The

of the Museum. At last, in 1796, Lord Auckland seriously stirred the Government. learned bodies got a Committee appointed, who reported in favour of the purchase at the price of £15,000, which was voted June 13, 1799. Hunter had spent £70,000 on the collection.

It was first offered by the Government to the College of Physicians and declined; the Council demurred to the cost of keeping up such a collection without an adequate endowment. There was then a thought of making it part of the British Museum; but on December 23rd, the Council of the College of Surgeons, bolder than the Physicians, came to a unanimous vote to accept the trust on the terms proposed

1. Of preserving the collection in the best possible order.

2. Of giving proper access to the collection, both to the profession and the public, properly introduced.

3. Of cataloguing and appointing a curator.

covering for the face, used by the South Sea Islanders when travelling, to protect their faces from the snow storms!" Truly a "happy thought" of the great auc

tioneer.

4. Of delivering an annual course of lectures

on comparative anatomy.

The means of meeting the great cost of the collection was raised by fees on diplomas, under the charter obtained in 1800.

A Board of Curators was appointed by the College in July, 1800, to regulate the management of the Museum, and superintend the preparation of catalogues. For six years the collection remained in its old quarters. In 1806, when the lease expired, it was transferred to temporary quarters in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and in 1813, on the completion of the College building, to its present home.1 Since 1807, two annual courses of fifteen lectures each-one on anatomy, the other on surgeryhave been delivered and since 1813, an annual oration, on Hunter's birthday, February 14. Constant additions have since been made to the Museum, which now stands unrivalled of its kind- -a noble monument of its great conceiver and collector. But Hunter, when cut off, contemplated a still greater work, no less than a com

plete scheme of animal life, of which his Museum was, as it were, but the table of contents.

"The main object," says the author of the excellent article on Hunter in the "Penny Cyclopædia," "which he had in view in forming his museum, was to illustrate as far as possible the whole subject of life, by preparations of the bodies in which its phenomena are presented. The physiological series includes dissections of the organs of plants and animals, classed according to their vital functions, and in each class passing from the most simple to the most complex. They were disposed in two main divisions: the first illustrative of the functions which minister to the necessities of the individual; the second, which provide for the continuance of the species. The first division commenced with a few examples of the component parts of organic bodies, as sap, blood, &c. Then were exhibited the organs of support and motion; those of digestion, nutrition, circulation, respiration, &c. Then came the organs which place beings in relation with the external world, as the nervous system, organs of sense, external covering.

"The other chief division of the physiological part of the collection contained the organs of reproduction of plants and animals, the preparations illustrative of the gradual development of the young, and the organs temporarily subservient to their preservation before and after birth.

"Parts of the same general collection, though separately arranged, were nearly 1,000 skeletons, nearly 3,000 minerals and plants preserved in spirits, upwards of 1,200 fossils, and a large collection of monsters.

"The pathological part of the museum contained about 2,500 specimens, in three great departments: the first illustrating the processes of common diseases, and the actions of

restoration; the second, the effects of specific diseases; and the third, the effects of various diseases, arranged according to their locality in the body. This included a collection of about 700 calculi, and other inorganic concretions. These few words may give some idea of Hunter's prodigious labour and industry as a collector; but his museum contains sufficient proof that he was no mere collector. It was formed with a design the most admirable, and arranged in a manner the most philosophic; and when it is remembered that it was all the work of one man, labouring under every disadvantage of deficient education, and of limited and often embarrassed means, it affords, perhaps, better evidence of the strength and originality of Hunter's mind than any of his written books, when he speaks by facts that in his Museum are ready to speak for themselves."

But besides his merits in the collection of his great and ordered Museum, let it not be forgotten that in John Hunter we are bound to reverence also the father of scientific surgery, on the grounds laid by a master hand in the sketch which follows.

SKETCH OF HUNTER'S SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER AND WORKS.

OHN HUNTER possessed in an eminent degree two characteristics of genius-power of endurance of labour and unconsciousness of such power, in the sense of being vain of it, or of craving for the world's appreciation of its results. To quote one of his own pithy apophthegms, "No

man ever

was a great man who wanted to be one." What Hunter desired was to get more knowledge than his times afforded of the laws of living beings. To this end he devoted the leisure, that remained after the practice of his profession as surgeon, to investigations of the structure of plants and animals, and to experiments for ascertaining the ways in which