and who are able to discern the way in which different schemes of national thought have given different shapes to national character, and have thereby modified the whole course of human affairs, to an extent of which the ordinary compilers of history have not the slightest suspicion.

Hunter remained in Scotland till the age of twenty, when he settled in London; and, though he was abroad for about three years, he abandoned his own country, and became, socially and intellectually, a native of England.238 Hence, the early associations of his mind were formed in the midst of a deductive nation; the later associations, in the midst of an inductive one. For twenty years he lived among a people, who are, perhaps, the acutest reasoners in Europe, if you concede to them the principles from which they reason; but who, on the other hand, owing to their proneness to this method, are so greedy after general principles, that they will accept them on almost any evidence, and are, therefore, at once very credulous and very logical. In that school, and surrounded by those habits, the intellect of John Hunter was nurtured during the most impressible period of his life. Then the scene suddenly shifted. Coming to England, he passed forty years in the heart of the most empirical nation in Europe; a nation utterly abhorring all general principles, priding itself on its common sense, boasting, and with good reason too, of its practical sagacity, proclaiming aloud the superiority of facts over ideas, and despising every theory, unless some direct and immediate benefit could be expected to accrue from it. The young and ardent Scotchman found himself transplanted into a country totally different from that which he had just quitted; and such a difference could not fail

238 He was born in 1728, and came to London in 1748. Adams' Life of John Hunter, second edit. London, 1818, pp. 20, 203. According to Adams (pp. 30-35), he was abroad as surgeon in the English army from 1761 to 1763; though, in Foot's Life of Hunter, London, 1794, p. 78, he is said to have returned to England in 1762. Mr. Ottley says that he returned in 1763. Ottley's Life of Hunter, p. 22, in vol. i. of Hunter's Works, edited by Palmer, London, 1835.

to influence his mind. He saw, on every side, marks of prosperity, and of long and uninterrupted success, not only in practical, but also in speculative, life; and he was told that these things were effected by a system which made facts the first consideration. He was ambitious of fame, but he perceived that the road to fame was not the same in England as in Scotland. In Scotland, a great logician would be deemed a great man; in England, little account would be made of the beauty of his logic, unless he was careful that the premisses from which he argued, were trustworthy, and verified by experience. A new machine, a new experiment, the discovery of a salt, or of a bone, would, in England, receive a wider homage, than the most profound speculation from which no obvious results were apprehended. That this way of contemplating affairs has produced great good, is certain. But it is also certain, that it is a one-sided way, and satisfies orly part of the human mind. Many of the noblest intellects crave for something which it cannot supply. In England, however, during the greater part of the eighteenth century, it was even more supreme than it is now, and was, indeed, so universal, that, from the year 1727 until nearly the close of the century, our country did not possess, in any branch of science, a speculator who had sufficient force to raise himself above those narrow views which were then deemed the perfec tion of wisdom.239 Much was added to our knowledge, but its distant boundaries were not enlarged. Though

there was an increase of curious and valuable details, and though several of the small and proximate laws of nature were generalized, it must be admitted, that those lofty generalizations, which we owe to the seventeenth century, remained stationary, and that no attempt was made to push beyond them. When John Hunter arrived in London, in 1748, Newton had been dead more than twenty years, and the English people, absorbed in prac-· tical pursuits, and now beginning, for the first time, to

239 See Buckle's History of Civilization, vol. i. pp. 808, 809.

enter into political life, had become more averse than ever to inquiries which aimed at truth without regard to utility, and had accustomed themselves to value science chiefly for the sake of the direct and tangible benefit which they might hope to derive from it.

That Hunter must have been influenced by these circumstances, will be obvious to whoever considers how impossible it is for any single mind to escape from the pressure of contemporary opinion. But, inasmuch as all his early associations had inclined him in another direction, we perceive that, during his long residence in England, he was acted on by two conflicting forces. The country of his birth made him deductive; the country of his adoption made him inductive. As a Scotchman, he preferred reasoning from general principles to particular facts; as an inhabitant of England, he became inured to the opposite plan of reasoning from particular facts to general principles. In every country, men naturally give the first place to what is most valued. The English respect facts more than principles, and therefore begin with the facts. The Scotch consider principles as most important, and therefore begin with the principles. And, I make no doubt that one of the reasons why Hunter, in investigating a subject, is often obscure, is that, on such occasions, his mind was divided between these two hostile methods, and that, leaning sometimes to one and sometimes to the other, he was unable to determine which he should choose. The conflict darkened his understanding. Adam Smith, on the other hand, in common with all the great Scotchmen who remained in Scotland, was remarkably clear. He, like Hume, Black, and Cullen, never wavered in his method. These eminent men were not acted on by English influence. Of all the most illustrious Scotchmen of the eighteenth century, Hunter alone underwent that influence, and he alone displayed a certain hesitation and perplexity of thought, which seems unnatural to so great a mind, and which, as it appears to me, is best explained by the peculiar circumstances in which he was placed.

One of the ablest of his commentators has justly observed, that his natural inclination was, to conjecture what the laws of nature were, and then reason from them, instead of reasoning to them by slow and gradual induction.240 This process of deduction was, as I have shown, the favourite method of all Scotchmen, and, therefore, was precisely the course which we should have expected him to adopt. But, inasmuch as he was surrounded by the followers of Bacon,241 this natural bias was warped, and a large part of his marvellous activity was employed in observations and experiments, such as no Scotch thinker, living in Scotland, would ever have engaged in. He himself declared, that thinking was his delight; 242 and there can be no doubt that, had he been differently situated, thinking would have been his principal pursuit. As it was, the industry with which he collected facts, is one of the most conspicuous features in his career. His researches covered the whole range of the animal kingdom, and were conducted with such untiring zeal, that he dissected upwards of five hundred different species,

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240 He followed his natural inclination. He preferred the more delusive, apparently the more direct, road, which has seduced so many philosophers. He sought to arrive at the general laws of nature at once by conjecture; rather than, by a close and detailed study of her inferior operations, to ascend, step by step, through a slow and gradual induction to those laws which govern her general procedure." Babington's Preface to Hunter's Treatise on the Venereal Disease, in Hunter's Works, vol. ii. p. 129. Compare the narrow and carping criticism in Foot's Life of Hunter, p. 163.

241 That I may not be suspected of exaggeration, I will quote what by far the greatest of all the historians of medicine has said upon this subject. "La majorité des médecins qui prétendaient s'être formés d'après Bacon, n'avaient hérité de lui qu'une répugnance invincible pour les hypothèses et les systèmes, une grande vénération pour l'expérience, et un désir extréme de multiplier le nombre des observations. Ce fut chez les Anglais que la méthode empirique en médecine trouva le plus de partisans, et c'est principalement aussi chez eux qu'elle s'est répandue jusqu'aux temps les plus rapprochés de nous. Sa propagation y fut favorisée, non-seulement par le profond respect que les Anglais continuent toujours de porter à l'immortel chancelier, mais encore par la haute importance que la nation entière attache au sens commun, common sense, et elle y demeura l'ennemie irréconciliable de tous les systèmes qui ne reposent pas sur l'observation." Sprengel, Histoire de la Médecine, vol. v. p. 411, Paris, 1815.

242 Clive says,

"Much as Mr. Hunter did, he thought still more. He has often told me, his delight was, to think." Abernethy's Hunterian Oration, London, 1819, p. 26.

exclusive of dissections of different individuals, and exclusive, too, of dissections of a large number of plants.243 The results were carefully arranged and stored up in that noble collection which he formed, and of the magnitude of which we may gain some idea from the statement, that, at his death, it contained upwards of ten thousand preparations illustrative of the phenomena of nature.244 By this means, he became so intimately acquainted with the animal kingdom, that he made a vast number of discoveries, which, considered singly, are curious, but which, when put together, constitute an invaluable body of new truths. Of these, the most important are, the true nature of the circulation in crustacea and insects; 245 the organ of hearing in cephalopods; 216 the power possessed by mollusks of absorbing

243 Mr. Owen, in his interesting Preface to the fourth volume of Hunter's Works, says (p. vii.), "There is proof that Hunter anatomized at least five hundred different species of animals, exclusive of repeated dissections of different individuals of the same species, besides the dissections of plants to a considerable amount."

244"Some idea may be formed of Hunter's extraordinary diligence, by the fact, that his museum contained at the time of his death, upwards of 10,000 preparations, illustrative of human and comparative anatomy, physiology, and pathology, and natural history." Weld's History of the Royal Society, London, 1848, vol. ii. p. 92.

243 I have tested the conflicting evidence of these observers by dissection of the heart in the lobster; and you will perceive by this preparation that it is more complicated than even the Danish naturalist supposed, and fully bears out the opinion of Hunter in regard to the mixed nature of the circulation in the crustacea." Owen's Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Invertebrate Animals, 2d edit. London, 1855, p. 318. "Cuvier, misled by the anomalous diffused condition of the venous system, supposed that there was no circulation of the blood in insects; yet the dorsal vessel was too conspicuous a structure to be overlooked. Such, however, was the authority of the great anatomist, that the nature of the heart began to be doubted, and the strangest functions to be attributed to it. Hunter, however, who was prepared to appreciate the true state of the circulating system in insects, by his discovery of the approximately diffused and irregular structure of the veins in the crustacea, has described, in his work on the blood, all the leading characters of the circulation in insects as it is recognized by comparative physiologists of the present day." Ibid., p. 383. Compare Hunter's Essays and Observations on Natural History, London, 1861, vol. i. p. 108.

248 The class called Sepia has the organ of hearing, though somewhat differently constructed from what it is in fishes." An Account of the Organ of Hearing in Fishes, in Hunter's Works, vol. iv. p. 294. At the bottom of the page Mr. Owen observes, in a note, "This is the first announcement of the existence of an organ of hearing in the Cephalopoda."