physiologist he was quite unrivalled; among the pathologists of his time he was by far the first; among the few geologists and students of vegetable physiology he was one, if not chief; and he was a great practical surgeon, surgeon to a large hospital, and holding for some years the largest practice in this town. In all these subjects at one time, no one but Hunter has ever been eminent and active.

And it is not only in the range but in the depth and thoroughness of his scientific work that he is distinguished. It is not possible now to tell, by any examples, the thoroughness of his scientific work. Let me say only, that in the whole range of subjects which I just now indicated there was not one which he did not study as completely as was possible; not one in which he did not enlarge the area of enquiry far beyond that covered by those before him. In every department of the sciences of life he made investigations wholly original; he observed and recorded facts past counting; he discerned in his facts large general laws.

These notes concerning Hunter's work tell the chief characters of his mind; massiveness and grandeur of design appear in all he did; and in perfect harmony with these was the simplicity of his usual method of work. It was, mainly, the orderly accumulation of facts of every kind from every source, and the building of them up in the plainest inductions. If he had been an architect, he would have built huge pyramids, and every stone would have borne its own inscription. He knew nothing of logic or of the science of thought; he used his natural mental powers, as with a natural instinct-used them with all his

might, but without art or consciousness of method. I know no instance more signal than was in him of the living force there is in facts when they are stored in a thoughtful mind.

But Hunter was not only a great observer; he was a very accurate one. Among the masses of facts recorded by him, it would be hard to find any that are erroneously observed or stated: when there are errors in his works they are errors of reasoning, not of observation.

And I note it as an exemplary instance of his accuracy, that when he tells his general inferences from facts, he habitually uses words implying that he regarded them as only probable. A fact he tells without conditions; when he generalises, it is commonly with such words as 'I conceive,' I suspect,' 'I am disposed to believe,' or the like.

I think, too, that no instance can be found in which he tried to add to the strength of evidence by strong personal assertion; as if his opinion were to be taken for weight in an estimate of probability. Nay, there are very rarely any expressions implying strong conviction on any · large question in biology, No one, I think, knew better than Hunter that, in science, strong convictions are not usually the signs of knowledge. He seems to have always felt that, in the consideration of general principles, he had only reached near to the greatest probability attainable at the time; that another year or more of investigation would bring him nearer the truth, and that which now seemed right would be surpassed or set aside. He used even thus to tell the pupils at his lectures: Don't take notes of this; I dare say I shall change it all next year." Similarly in Ottley's Life, p. 49.

1

It is another sign of this wise caution that he always hesitated to publish his knowledge. He worked for eighteen years before he published anything in his own name. He was forty-three when he published his first book, that on the Teeth; he began to collect the materials of his great work on the Blood and Inflammation while he was a student; some of the experiments recorded in it were made while he was house-surgeon at St. George's; he worked at it for forty years, and began to print it only just before he died.

And he was as patient as he was cautious. Abernethy, who knew him well, says: It is scarcely credible with what patience Mr. Hunter examined the lower kinds of animals; and he quotes Mr. Clift as saying, that he would stand for hours, motionless as a statue, except that, with a pair of forceps in either hand, he was picking asunder the connecting fibres of some structure' he was studying. A very striking picture: for this was in the last year of Hunter's life; he was growing old; he had lately been very ill, and he knew that he was in instant peril of that sudden death in which, at last, he fell; he was poor, for all that he could earn, and more, he needed for his collection; and he was overworked in practice and in the duties of Surgeon-General to the Army. Yet 'he would stand for hours, motionless as a statue; patient and watchful as a prophet, as if he were sure that the truth would come, whether in the gradual unveiling of new forms, or in the clearing of some mental cloud, or as in a sudden flash, with which, as in an inspiration, the intellectual darkness becomes light.1

1 See Note F.

In all these indications of Hunter's character we may observe, together with grandeur in design, and a power and strong will well proportioned to his design, an unusual prudence in all the work of observation; and yet he was very fond of scientific enterprise and speculation. The qualities may seem incongruous; but they are associated in the most attractive minds, and may be traced in Darwin and others of the best of our own time.

Enterprise was shown in his devotion to experiment. If there were one class of facts which he loved better than all besides, it was of those which he could thus obtain. He seems to have had a very keen enjoyment of that mental state in which is the very spirit of enterprise; the state in which the mind waits, watching for the solution of a problem which itself has made, standing as it were in the presence of the about-to-be-known.

And, as he was always thinking-out beyond the facts which he could collect in the normal course of nature, always projecting his mind beyond his knowledge, so he made every question that he could the subject of experiment. He used to say to those who seemed content with thinking about what might be known: 'Don't think: try; be patient; be accurate.'1

But, where observation and experiment could not reach, few were bolder in thinking than Hunter was. His long practice in experiments justified him in this, by educating him for more distant mental enterprise; for a well-devised experiment, such as many of his were, deserves the name of project, in that the mind, throwing itself forward in advance of present knowledge, believes

1 Baron's Life of Jenner, vol. i. p. 124.

that the truth must be in one of two or a few more probabilities, and then devises means for ascertaining where it is; and a mind which has been strengthened and long trained in this kind of exercise may sometimes safely project itself much further, and, going beyond the range of experiment, may discern a general truth very far in advance of ascertained facts, or even from a stand-point of partial error. Hunter could sometimes, with very striking power and precision, thus think the truth.

Thus, for one example, he thought the truth that the blood is alive; not in any supernatural or transcendent sense, as some before him thought, but in the same sense as are all other parts of the same living body. In this sense his discernment of the life of the blood was a real discovery; not a guess, or, in the worser sense, a mere scientific imagination; for he saw fully the bearings of the doctrine, and it guided him to some of the first steps in his true pathology of the blood.

The truth is now proved beyond all doubt: but if we look to the facts on which Hunter first founded his decision, they seem insufficient; and we have to assign the discovery chiefly to the power of his strong, far-seeing mind looking out beyond all evidence.

Similarly, in his essay on the development of the chick, he indicates, though from what may be thought too few facts, that great and marvellous law in development, that every higher animal, in its progress from the embryo to the complete form, passes through a series of changes, in each of which it resembles the complete form of some order lower than itself.1 And this discovery, like 1 Physiological Catalogue by Owen, vol. i. p. ii.