The New Medical Building.

During the Christmas recess, I had the fortune to make a hasty visit to the new building of the Medical School, the Harvard home of the successors of Hippocrates and Aesculapins, now being used for the second year. Of the outside of the great building on Boylston street it is needless to speak ; it is familiar to most of the undergraduates either by personal observation or photographs. Few of them, however, see the inside, and it is not till after graduation that a certain large per cent of the A. B's who have enrolled themselves in the school become familiar with it.

On entering the main hall the first thing which strikes the observer is the substantial appearance of evrything about him. Quite in keeping with the solid exterior is the heavy woodwork, iron s aircases and tiled floors, all giving the impression that the building was made to last through many years of hard usage. Though substantial and solid in appearance, the building, neither without nor within, is unsightly, the decoration and finish in the quiet style and colors now prevalent satisfying even the eye of the artist. The first specific thing which attracts attention is an inscription on the wall above the staircase, giving in a few words a short history of the medical department of Harvard. The first lectures were given in 1783 in Harvard Hall, Cambridge. In 1810, the school was moved to Boston, where, in 1815, it occupied the new Hall on Mason street, built for it by the state, whose ward Harvard College then was. Since then only two changes have taken place, first, in 1846, to the North Grove street building, which is still used for medical purposes ; and second, in 1883, just one hundred years after the introduction of the study at Harvard, to the present commodious building. On the wall opposite that which contains this bit of history, is a plain white marble tablet, with black lettering. It commemorates the medical students and alumni, twenty-one in number, who gave their lives in defence of the Union, and was presented to the school by the class of '70.

The lecture rooms, laboratories, etc., open out of the main hall, and are legibly marked, so that even a stranger can find his way about with ease. On the first floor is the library, containing 2100 volumes, with room for many more, a large study with tables, and a smokingroom for the students, a faculty room, quarters for the janitor, and several smaller rooms. Above are the four lecture rooms, the various chemical, pathological and other laboratories, rooms for the curator and some of the professors, the Warren Museum, and the dissecting room, or "dead-man's hall." Of the lecture rooms, two are of double height, and in them the seats for the students rise above the lecturer in almost perpendicular tiers. In one of them is the portrait of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, presented to the school by his friends, when he retired from the chair of anatomy a year ago. The laboratories are of little interest to the average man, but are the places where the students spend much of their time and with which they are most familiar.

To the stranger, the spot in the whole building of most interest is the Warren Museum, situated in the front of the upper stories. Here are gathered all things medical, in a collection which has not an equal in this country. It was founded many years ago by old Dr. John C. Warren, one of the celebrities of the medical profession, and a man much interested in the school. Among them are many very curious things which would fill the soul of a dime museum propritor with envy. As, for instance, a cast of the skull of the horned woman, who had ragged pieces of horns six inches long protruding from her forehead, and the skull of a man who was cured after having an iron tamping bar pass through his head. Such are few of the wonders of the museum.