DR. HOLMES' LAST LECTURE BEFORE THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered Tuesday his last lecture at the Harvard Medical School. One o'clock-the hour for the anatomical lecture at the school-found the amphitheatre packed with students of all classes, among whom were many gray-haired practitioners, assembled to hear their old teacher give his last lecture. The advent of the doctor was marked by the rising of the pupils, and as their clapping ceased, one of the members of the school presented him, in behalf of his last class, a beautiful "Loving Cup," inscribed with a quotation from one of the "poet's" own poems. This proof of the esteem of his pupils was a hard blow to the doctor, but the inevitable photographer and his camera gave him time to recover sufficiently to begin his lecture. There were three times in a man's life, he said, when he might properly consider himself the centre of attraction-at his christening, at his marriage, and at his own funeral. And this, the beginning of his thirty-sixth course of lectures on anatomy, was the end of his connection with the school. For about half of this time he had also taught physiology, but with the growth of the science had gladly given it over to form a separate department. It was a good thing for a college to get rid of her old men. Their ideas were antiquated, and the college had better let them go. He had held his office so long because he taught a subject which could never become antiquated. During his lifetime it had received very few important additions or emendations. He had begun the study of law in his youth as an experiment, but for various reasons had turned his attention to medicine. While in the Law School he had engaged with some friends in publishing a paper, and for the first time saw himself in print. From the printer's type he contracted the disease of author's lead poisoning, which he had never quite got rid of. He began the study of medicine, as most young men do, with a quickened pulse at the sight of the grinning skeletons of the school, and with his cheeks reflecting the whiteness of the hospital sheets-sights which had since become the merest commonplace with him.

Then came an account of the teachers and associates of his youth, of his studies at the Invalides in Paris, and the noted physicians who taught there, an account which was the basis of many anecdotes and pleasantries of a professional nature that caused much merriment among his hearers. His "Show of Ghost" (as he termed it) being over, he finished with some practical remarks on the way in which the science was tending, and indulged in some pleasant sarcasms on the building now occupied by the school and the new building, a promised land which they were soon to enter.

Thus are ended the teachings of Dr. Holmes as an anatomist, who has by his wit and humor made interesting and attractive the dry and repulsive study of anatomy, and who has by his kindness made his name dear to many a physician.-[Journal.