Page:The Hunterian Oration1843.djvu/26

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tomy. When I represent his arrangement as that according to organs, perhaps I ought to add, and of function, for although the former was the visible manifestation, the latter was the presiding idea. And the quarto manuscript catalogue, the most valuable Hunterian document remaining to the College, de- rives its chief importance from the information it supplies respecting the scheme of arrangement, and the general physiological principles intended to be illustrated by the different series of preparations. It was this circumstance which distinguished Hunter from the other most successful cultivator of compa- rative anatomy in modern times. He studied this important subject with a view to physiology—Cuvier with a view chiefly to zoological classification.

Unfortunately for the earlier recognition of Hunter’s high claims in anatomy and physiology, these could not be fairly or fully estimated until his manuscripts were published, within the last few years, by the College, in the physiological catalogue explanatory of his collection. And what must not science, as well as his reputation, have lost in those ten folio volumes of manuscript so shamefully committed to the flames !

But Mr. Hunter’s “ Memoirs and Essays on vari- ous parts of the Animal Giconomy ” distinctly show the vast range of physiological subjects which his mind grasped. And those who seek 1o know what his powers of observation, reflection, and investiga- tion, were capable of, would do well to read his papers on digestion, animal heat, respiration, and