To understand the old writers one must see as they saw, feel as they felt, believe as they believed--and this is hard, indeed impossible! We may get near them by asking the Spirit of the Age in which they lived to enter in and dwell with us, but it does not always come.

Literary criticism is not literary history--we have no use here for the former, but to analyze his writings is to get as far as we can behind the doors of a man's mind, to know and appraise his knowledge, not from our standpoint, but from that of his contemporaries, his predecessors and his immediate successors.

Each generation has its own problems to face, looks at truth from a special focus and does not see quite the same outlines as any other.

For example, men of the present generation grow up under influences very different from those which surrounded my generation in the seventies of the last century, when Virchow and his great contemporaries laid the sure and deep foundations of modern pathology.

Which of you now knows the "Cellular Pathology" as we did?
To many of you it is a closed book,--to many more Virchow may be thought a spent force.