her husband twenty-eight years, and lived to see her brother, Sir Everard Home, acquire in surgery a celebrity only less than John Hunter's. She died in Holies Street, London, January 7, 1821, in the seventy-ninth year of her age.—R. H.
HUNTER, Henry, born at Culross on the northern shore of the frith of Forth, August 25, 1741. Educated at the university of Edinburgh, he was licensed May 2, 1764, and rose into such instant popularity that several congregations competed for the services of the young Apollos. He accepted an invitation to become the minister of South Leith, and was ordained January 9, 1766. Three years after his settlement here he paid a visit to London, and on the Scotch congregations there his preaching produced so great an impression, that soon after his return he was followed by invitations to the pastorate of Swallow Street and London Wall, the latter of which he accepted, and was inducted to the charge, August 11, 1771. At that period London Wall was the most important Scotch church in the capital. The stately mansions of the city were still inhabited by its merchant princes, and it was a magnificent array of snowy frills and powdered cues which every Sunday morning spread out in the spacious square pews of the presbyterian meeting-house; and, as many of the Scottish nobility were still attached to the church of their fathers, the congregation was aristocratic as well as wealthy. Indeed, we have heard a tradition how, on occasion of some patriotic collection, the four plates were held by as many dukes; and during the thirty years of Dr. Hunter's incumbency there was no abatement of its prestige, no ebb in its prosperity. His sermons were eminently attractive. Released from scholastic trammels, they proceeded in a style remarkably free, graceful, and engaging, pervaded by a fine glow of manly, affectionate feeling, and adorned with an exhaustless profusion of the richest imagery. They had the still greater merit of combining with evangelical principles the details of daily duty, as well as pathetic enforcements of the social and domestic charities; nor would it be easy to name any discourses in which the word of God dwelt so richly—the aptest quotations and allusions constantly gleaming forth, so as to illuminate and hallow all the context, or closing a period with a point and appositeness so remarkable as to have all the effect of a pleasant surprise. Soon after his settlement in London, Dr. Hunter began to deliver a course of lectures on the lives of Old Testament worthies. Of these he published two volumes in 1784. They proved so successful that they were speedily followed by five others. His "Sacred Biography" has passed through many editions; and, though the style is too florid, our older experience has not materially altered our youthful prepossessions, and we still deem it a charming book. Of the old patriarchal and prophetic time we possess no panorama so vivid; and, as in other scene-painting, every allowance must be made for broad strokes and bright colours. Besides the "Sacred Biography," Dr. Hunter published various single sermons, afterwards collected into two volumes. He also translated St. Pierre's Studies of Nature, and Euler's Letters to a German Princess, as well as Lavater's great work on Physiognomy. To Lavater he was such a devotee that, in order to make his acquaintance, he undertook a pilgrimage to Zurich in 1787; although he seems to have returned with a reverence somewhat abated towards the egotistical and garrulous old gentleman. Dr. Hunter died at Bristol, October 27, 1802, and was buried in Bunhill Fields on the 6th of November following, where his monument has lately been restored by an admiring fellow-countryman.—J. H.
HUNTER, John, one of the most distinguished anatomists, physiologists, and practical surgeons of any age or nation, was born in 1728 at Long Calderwood, in the parish of Kilbride, in the county of Lanark, where his father possessed a small property. The old gentleman was seventy years of age when this his youngest child was born, and died when the boy had only reached his tenth year. Indulged by both parents, and more especially by his widowed mother, the lad's education was so completely neglected, that at the age of twenty he could do little more than simply read and write, and that only in his own language. This complete want of anything like classical knowledge, though felt by him through his whole life, only showed the more strongly the native genius which he possessed. One of his sisters married a Mr. Buchanan, a cabinetmaker in Glasgow, who soon became involved in pecuniary difficulties. To assist her, to whom he was much attached, he went to Glasgow when he was seventeen years of age, and for three years attended to Mr. Buchanan's business, working himself occasionally when pressing orders arrived. To this, no doubt, in a great measure he owed the manual dexterity which ever distinguished him Having heard at various times of the great reputation and success which his brother William had achieved in London, and tired of such occupations as he had had for some years, he wrote to him to offer his services as an assistant in his anatomical demonstrations. The offer was frankly accepted; and, accompanied by a Mr. Hamilton, John Hunter performed the journey to London on horseback. He arrived in the metropolis in 1748, and devoted himself thenceforward with the utmost determination and the greatest zeal to anatomical pursuits. He also studied surgery, at first in Chelsea hospital under the celebrated Cheselden, and afterwards in St. Bartholomew's under Mr. Pott. In 1755 he was admitted to a partnership with his brother William, and took part in his lectures. He could not compete with his brother in lecturing, but for making anatomical preparations and for dissections he was unrivalled in skill. He laboured hard for ten years in this way, till at last his health gave way, and he was compelled to seek relaxation and change of air. In 1760, when in his thirty-second year, he obtained an appointment as staff-surgeon, and in the following spring he accompanied the expedition sent out to besiege Belleisle. He remained with the army till 1763, when a peace being negotiated, he returned to London. His health was now re-established, but his prospects of success as a practitioner in London were small indeed. He resumed, however, with unabated zeal his anatomical pursuits; and finding his half-pay and the remuneration from his profession inadequate to his expenses, he commenced a series of lectures on practical anatomy and operative surgery. With the money obtained by these means he purchased a piece of ground at Earl's Court, Brompton, near London, where he built a house, and commenced a series of experiments on physiological subjects which he could not carry on in a crowded city. The fame acquired by his dissections and by these scientific researches led the Royal Society to elect him a fellow; and in 1768 he was appointed surgeon to St. George's hospital. This latter appointment was of great importance to Hunter in a pecuniary point of view, as it led to increase of practice, and enabled him to take pupils who paid him large fees. His whole life was now occupied with the constant and laborious investigation of every branch of natural history and comparative anatomy, physiology, and pathology, to all of which he devoted every hour he could snatch from the requirements of an increasing practice. In 1776 he was appointed surgeon-extraordinary to the king, and in 1789 inspector-general of hospitals, and surgeon-general of the army. During this time and for the remainder of his life he retired as much as he could to his house at Earl's Court, where he continued his researches, and increased the number of his valuable preparations. This collection was now so extensive that he took a large house in Leicester Square to receive it, and he began to arrange and classify it previous to his preparing a complete catalogue of its contents. His health began in 1773 to show symptoms of decline. In that year he had the first attack of that affection of the heart that ultimately carried him off. Though for a few years after that his health at times was pretty good, the attacks of angina pectoris (the particular disease from which he suffered) became gradually more frequent. He experienced also at times peculiar affections in the head, his temper became more and more irritable, and at last on the 16th October, 1793, at the age of sixty-five, he suddenly expired. On that day he attended a meeting of his colleagues at St. George's hospital, when, annoyed at something said, he left the room to control his rage, and immediately, with a sudden groan, fell dead into the arms of a friend standing by. After his death the blood vessels of both brain and heart were found to have become ossified. His body was interred in the vault under the parish church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. John Hunter was below the ordinary middle stature, but he was of an active disposition, and well formed for muscular exertion. Sir Everard Home relates as an instance of this, and the determination of his character, that one day when at his house in Earl's Court, where he had a small menagerie for the purpose of studying the habits of wild animals, two leopards which he had kept there in an outhouse broke loose from their confinement and got into a yard among some dogs, which they immediately attacked. The howling produced by this alarmed the whole neighbourhood, and brought Mr. Hunter to see what was the matter. When he arrived at the spot he
