could never adequately expound the information already accessible on any subject. Most of what he knew he had acquired himself, and he attached perhaps undue importance to personal investigation. Few men have ever done so much with so little book-learning. His detachment from books, combined with his patient search for facts, gave him a vital grip of subjects most needing to be studied in the concrete. His opinions were always in process of improvement, and he never clung to former opinions through conservatism. Yet he was a tory in politics, and 'wished all the rascals who were dissatisfied with their country would be good enough to leave it.' He would rather have seen his museum on fire than show it to a democrat. He was usually taciturn, but when he spoke his words were well chosen, forcible, and pointed, often broadly or coarsely humorous. But although he could never spell well or write grammatically, and his writings were carefully revised by others before they were printed, they preserve his ruggedness of style. He occasionally became confused in his lectures, and,would advise his hearers not to take down a passage. ' My mind is like a beehive,' he said to Abernethy, a simile which struck the latter as very correct, for in the midst of buzz and apparent confusion there was great order, regularity, and abundant store of food, which had been collected by incessant industry (Hunterian Oration, 1819). His power of sustained and persevering industry was enormous. Clift describes' him as ' standing for hours, motionless as a statue, except that, with a pair of forceps in each hand, he was picking asunder the connecting fibres of some structure he was studying,' and he was equally capable of absorption for hours in thought. He felt that, although he was really a mere pigmy in knowledge, he was a giant compared with his contemporaries. He only valued money for the aid that it gave to his researches. He never took fees from curates, authors, or artists. His income, which first reached 1,000l. in 1774, was 5,000l. for some years later, and 6,000l. before his death. He often sent valuable patients to young men starting in practice, and gave promising men tickets for his lectures.
As an investigator, original thinker, and stimulator of thought, Hunter stands at the head of British surgeons. His originality was equally evidenced in the devising of crucial experiments and in his prevision of truths which he could not have learned from others or by direct observation. Such truths are his belief that the blood is alive in the same sense as other parts of the body; and that higher animals in passing from the embryo to the complete form go through a series of changes, in each of which it resembles the adult form of some lower creature (Owen, Physiological Catalogue of College of Surgeons, vol. i. p.ii). He thought that occasional distinctness of sex in hermaphrodite animals might account for the origin of distinct sexes (compare Darwin, Descent of Man). His strong belief that life was a principle of force separate from and anterior to organisation was never clearly and consistently put forward; but it was raised by his pupils into a dogma, especially by Abernethy, and was an important subject of controversy before modern chemical and physical discoveries had given precision to physiological ideas. One of Hunter's most distinctive merits was his grasp of living beings in one view, as one science. He was an all-round naturalist with an object, that of explaining life and organisation, and discovering principles of surgery.
Hunter's ' Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gunshot Wounds' is his most important work; it is a compound of physiology, pathology, and surgery, and, while defective in regarding the red corpuscles as the least important part of the blood, is full of original observations and remarks. His account of inflammation necessarily loses value, since modern observations have revealed its nature, but it marked a great advance in knowledge, and for many years it stimulated the progress of surgery, and some of his views have been in recent times found to be truer than others which supplanted them. His most notable surgical advance was in the tying of the artery above the seat of disease in aneurysm. But the general influence of his teaching and method of study was even more important. Sir James Paget and many others term him 'the founder of scientific surgery,' as having first studied and directed attention to the processes of disease and repair on which the practice of surgery is based, and having brought to this study a large knowledge of physiology. He was a cautious rather than a brilliant operator, and never used the knife when he could avoid it, holding that 'to perform an operation is to mutilate a patient we cannot cure, and so an acknowledgment of the imperfection of our art.' He was very cautious in deductions from physiology, and ' in many of his writings on surgical practice there is hardly a sign that he was a great physiologist' Paget).
In comparative anatomy his work was extensive and of permanent value, yet not so valuable as Cuvier's, for he studied the subject in order to obtain knowledge of human physiology and pathology, and not for itself. But his papers as now published, and his museum
