Gentlemen,—In taking the chair of this Association allow me to offer to the members, whether present or absent, my sincere thanks for the honour they have done me in electing me their President. I frankly confess that I was not at all prepared for this honour, nor do I see quite clearly even now how it came about that a body of men devoted, both by personal tastes and by official position, to the cultivation of one particular branch of the great medical art and science, should have thought fit to honour with their confidence one whose relations with that special work are only those of the profession at large. At all events, it may justly be said that in having thus acted, you have most emphatically pronounced for the doctrine that the profession of medicine, and the healing art on which it rests, are one, and not manifold; and that as among the different churches, and even sects, we may hope to find a common Christianity, so among all the distracting specialisms of our own profession, we may reasonably hope to find one faith, one object, one discipline of the mind, and, to a great extent, one great science, both of mind and of bodily function, underlying all the diversities of our various careers as physician, surgeon, gynæcologist, oculist, aurist, alienist, &c.