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to the Linacre Professorship, the Linacre Professor might seem scarcely justified in declining an invitation to appear before the learned body to which in part he owed his position; and, though I mention it last, I felt first of all that a wish expressed to me, not so much by the official whom I am now addressing, as by the individual who now more than twenty years ago introduced me to Harvey's hospital, and has persistentry befriended me ever since, was a wish which I ought not lightly to disregard. If now, Sir, I follow an example which you have often set me, and, without needless preface or further personal allusions, address myself at once to the business before me, I shall thereby pay you the best of all compliments, by showing you that your teaching has not been wholly thrown away upon your former pupil. The time allotted to me I propose to occupy, firstly, in expounding with all possible brevity certain advances recently made in our knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the circulatory organs; and, secondly, in giving the as yet unrecorded history of one