Generation: he told me perhaps it did, and that as to Equivocal
Generation all we cd have was negative Proofs of its not taking Place.
He did not deny that Equivocal Generation happened; there were
neither positive proofs for nor against its taking place.”
To exemplify the differences between organic and inorganic growth, Hunter made and employed in his lectures a collection of crystallized specimens of minerals, or, as he termed them, “natural or native fossils.” Of fossils, designated by him “extraneous fossils,” because extraneous respecting the rocks in which they occur, he recognized the true nature, and he arranged them according to a system agreeing with that adopted for recent organisms. The study of fossils enabled him to apply his knowledge of the relations of the phenomena of life to conditions, as exhibited in times present, to the elucidation of the history of the earth in geological epochs. He observed the non-occurrence of fossils in granite, but with his customary scientific caution and insight could perceive no reason for supposing it to be the original matter of the globe, prior to vegetable or animal, or that its formation was different from that of other rocks. In water he recognized the chief agent in producing terrestrial changes (cf. Treatise on the Blood, p. 15, note); but the popular notion that the Noachian deluge might account for the marine organisms discovered on land he pointed out was untenable. From the diversity of the situations in which many fossils and allied living structures are found, he was led to infer that at various periods not only repeated oscillations of the level of the land, lasting thousands of centuries, but also great climatic variations, perhaps due to a change in the ecliptic, had taken place in geological times. Hunter considered that very few fossils of those that resemble recent forms are identical with them. He conceived that the latter might be varieties, but that if they are really different species, then “we must suppose that a new creation must have taken place.” It would appear, therefore, that the origin of species in variation had not struck him as possible. That he believed varieties to have resulted from the influence of changes in the conditions of life in times past is shown by a somewhat obscure passage in his “Introduction to Natural History” (Essays and Observations, i. 4), in which he remarks, “But, I think, we have reason to suppose that there was a period of time in which every species of natural production was the same, there being then no variety in any species,” and adds that “civilization has made varieties in many species, which are the domesticated.” Modern discoveries and doctrines as to the succession of life in time are again foreshadowed by him in the observation in his introduction to the description of drawings relative in incubation (quoted in Pref. to Cat. of Phys. Ser. i. p. iv., 1833) that: “If we were capable of following the progress of increase of the number of the parts of the most perfect animal, as they first formed in succession, from the very first, to its state of full perfection, we should probably be able to compare it with some one of the incomplete animals themselves, of every order of animals in the creation, being at no stage different from some of those inferior orders; or, in other words, if we were to take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we should probably find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage of the most perfect.”
In pathological phenomena Hunter discerned the results of the perturbation of those laws of life by which the healthy organism subsists. With him pathology was a science of vital dynamics. He afforded principles bearing not on single complaints only, but on the effects of injury and disease in general. To attempt to set forth what in Hunter’s teaching was new to pathology and systematic surgery, or was rendered so by his mode of treatment, would be well-nigh to present an epitome of all that he wrote on those subjects. “When we make a discovery in pathology,” says Adams, writing in 1818, “we only learn what we have overlooked in his writings or forgotten in his lectures.” Surgery, which only in 1745 had formally ceased to be associated with “the art and mystery of barbers,” he raised to the rank of a scientific profession. His doctrines were, necessarily, not those of his age: while lesser minds around him were still dim with the mists of the ignorance and dogmatism of times past, his lofty intellect was illumined by the dawn of a distant day.
Authorities.—See, besides the above quoted publications, An Appeal to the present Parliament ... on the subject of the late J. Hunter’s Museum (1795); Sir C. Bell, A Lecture ... being a Commentary on Mr J. Hunter s preparations of the Diseases of the Urethra (1830); The President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Address to the Committee for the Erection of a Statue of Hunter (Lond., March 29, 1859); Sir R. Owen, “Sketch of Hunter’s Scientific Character and Works,” in Tom Taylor’s Leicester Square (1874), also in Hunter’s Works, ed. by Palmer, vol. iv. (1837), and in Essays and Observations; the invaluable catalogues of the Hunterian Collection issued by the Royal College of Surgeons; and numerous Hunterian Orations. In the Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, by John White, is a paper containing directions for preserving animals, printed separately in 1809, besides six zoological descriptions by Hunter; and in the Natural History of Aleppo, by A. Russell, are remarks of Hunter’s on the anatomy of the jerboa and the camel’s stomach. Notes of his lectures on surgery, edited by J. W. K. Parkinson, appeared in 1833 under the title of Hunterian Reminiscences. Hunter’s Observations and Reflections on Geology, intended to serve as an introduction to the catalogue of his collection of extraneous fossils, was published in 1859, and his Memoranda on Vegetation in 1860. (F. H. B.)
HUNTER, ROBERT MERCER TALIAFERRO (1809–1887),
American statesman, was born in Essex county, Virginia, on the 21st of April 1809. He entered the university of Virginia
in his seventeenth year and was one of its first graduates; he
then studied law at the Winchester (Va.) Law School, and in
1830 was admitted to the bar. From 1835 to 1837 he was a
member of the Virginia house of delegates; from 1837 to 1843
and from 1845 to 1847 was a member of the national house of
representatives, being Speaker from 1839 to 1841; and from
1847 to 1861 he was in the senate, where he was chairman of the
finance committee (1850–1861). He is credited with having
brought about a reduction of the quantity of silver in the smaller
coins; he was the author of the Tariff Act of 1857 and of the
bonded-warehouse system, and was one of the first to advocate
civil service reform. In 1853 he declined President Fillmore’s
offer to make him secretary of state. At the National Democratic
Convention at Charleston, S.C., in 1860 he was the Virginia
delegation’s choice as candidate for the presidency of the United
States, but was defeated for the nomination by Stephen A.
Douglas. Hunter did not regard Lincoln’s election as being of
itself a sufficient cause for secession, and on the 11th of January
1861 he proposed an elaborate but impracticable scheme for the
adjustment of differences between the North and the South,
but when this and several other efforts to the same end had
failed he quietly urged his own state to pass the ordinance of
secession. From 1861 to 1862 he was secretary of state in the
Southern Confederacy; and from 1862 to 1865 was a member of
the Confederate senate, in which he was, at times, a caustic
critic of the Davis administration. He was one of the commissioners
to treat at the Hampton Roads Conference in 1865
(see Lincoln, Abraham), and after the surrender of General Lee
was summoned by President Lincoln to Richmond to confer
regarding the restoration of Virginia in the Union. From 1874
to 1880 he was treasurer of Virginia, and from 1885 until his
death near Lloyds, Virginia, on the 18th of July 1887, was
collector of the Port of Tappahannock, Virginia.
See Martha T. Hunter, A Memoir of Robert M. T. Hunter (Washington, 1903) for his private life, and D. R. Anderson, Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, in the John P. Branch Historical Papers of Randolph Macon College (vol. ii. No. 2, 1906), for his public career.
HUNTER, WILLIAM (1718–1783), British physiologist and
physician, the first great teacher of anatomy in England, was
born on the 23rd of May 1718, at East Kilbride, Lanark. He
was the seventh child of his parents, and an elder brother of the
still more famous John Hunter (q.v.). When fourteen years of
age, he was sent to the university of Glasgow, where he studied
for five years. He had originally been intended for the church,
but, scruples concerning subscription arising in his mind, he
followed the advice of his friend William Cullen, and resolved
to devote himself to physic. During 1737–1740 he resided with
Cullen at Hamilton, and then, to increase his medical knowledge
before settling in partnership with his friend, he spent the winter
of 1740–1741 at Edinburgh. Thence he went to London, where
Dr James Douglas (1675–1742), an anatomist and obstetrician
of some note, to whom he had been recommended, engaged his
services as a tutor to his son and as a dissector, and assisted him
to enter as a surgeon’s pupil at St George’s Hospital and to
procure the instruction of the anatomist Frank Nicholls (1699–1778).
When Dr Douglas died Hunter still continued to live
with his family. In 1746 he undertook, in place of Samuel Sharp,
the delivery, for a society of naval practitioners, of a series of
lectures on operative surgery, so satisfactorily that he was
requested to include anatomy in his course. It was not long
before he attained considerable fame as a lecturer; for not only
was his oratorical ability great, but he differed from his contemporaries
in the fullness and thoroughness of his teaching, and
in the care which he took to provide the best possible practical
illustrations of his discourses. We read that the syllabus of
Edward Nourse (1701–1761), published in 1748, totam rem
anatomicam complectens, comprised only twenty-three lectures,
exclusive of a short and defective “Syllabus Chirurgicus,” and
that at “one of the most reputable courses of anatomy in
