by bringing his hand down, by no means gently, on the table. “I will have no untruths spoken in my house, about me or about any guests.”
“Oh!” said, or rather emitted, Mrs. Berry. Two letters are nothing, but there may be from Alpha to Omega in two letters, and I think the noise made by the lady ran nearly that length in implied taunt and defiance.
“No untruths, to please anybody,” returned her husband.
“Perhaps it might have been well, not that I presume to dictate,” said Mrs. Berry, slowly, “if that notice had been given a little earlier.”
“You hear what I say,” replied Mr. Berry, understanding her meaning, but not choosing to do so. “Mrs. Empson knows perfectly well that intentional disrespect to her is out of the question, but I am sorry that she has lived all these years without learning how to take a friendly joke. When she can do so, I shall be as happy as I always am to see her here. You can explain that to her, Marion, without any unworthy subterfuges. Lygon, we will take our tumbler in the library.”
He led the younger man from the room. Arthur expected, at each instant, to receive a parting shot, but whether the sudden and very unusual manifestation of her husband’s anger had awed Mrs. Berry, or whether she preferred to defer operations until a more convenient season, the solicitor and his client were allowed to pass without further speech. Then the women made up their differences in a minute, and Hester entering, not empty-handed, they also made something else, after the manner of such ladies.
THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM AT THE
COLLEGE OF SURGEONS.
How many among the thousands who have viewed with artistic delight Sharp’s engraving of Sir Joshua’s picture of John Hunter, have ever taken the trouble to inquire further respecting the glories of the great original? Yet Hunter was, without the slightest doubt, one of the most prominent representative men of the last century—a man whose advent the great Bacon must have foreseen, and whose traces will be discernible to physiologists of the latest posterity. A poor lad, without friends—for those valuable ones he had, he unhappily became estranged from—wends his way from an obscure town in the north, sets resolutely to work, and bone by bone, tissue by tissue, specimen by specimen, builds up a history of animated creation from the shapeless zoophite to imperial man himself. Before the time of Hunter a few detached groups of facts were all that we possessed of the great chain of terrestrial life. By painful every-day toil, by incessant thought, link by link, he connected these groups together, supplied entire lengths that were deficient, and made manifest the spirit of unity that pervaded the whole. He touched the full diapason of organised life, and left to posterity in his great museum the harmonious song he had elicited from the most hidden recesses of nature. He did all this, and like many others in the ranks of pure philosophy, he died rich only in the gifts he had conferred upon mankind. When the exigencies of his widow demanded that his museum should be offered to the Government—which at that time meant William Pitt—the reply of the Minister was, characteristic of the warlike atmosphere in which he lived, “What, give 20,000l. for bottles? we want the money to buy gunpowder!” The value of the truths enshrined in those bottles, however, would prevail, and after seven years’ clamouring at the doors of Ministers, Science at length got a hearing in the House of Commons, and Parliament agreed to purchase the Hunterian Collection for the sum of 15,000l., and it was then transferred to the custody of the Corporation of Surgeons, which became incorporated in the year 1800 as the Royal College of Surgeons. Other grants of money were afterwards made towards the collection by Government, and the college itself has since built the magnificent museum in which is enshrined what may truly be considered the apotheosis of Hunter. Year by year this magnificent collection has been added to by purchase, and the additions made by the Curator of the college have gone on to such an extent that the preparations, physiological and pathological, the exclusive work of Hunter, which only numbered at his death 10,536, now reach to upwards of 30,000.
If the visitor happens to know an M.R.C.S., he readily obtains a passport to its lofty apartments, and as readily falls into a certain attitude of wonder at beholding such an infinity of natural objects in, to him, an unnatural dress.
American Elk antlers, locked together in combat, causing the death of both animals.The floors groaning with the weight of gigantic skeletons of extinct
