[1] Walter Coulson (1794?-1860), lawyer and journalist, was at one
time amanuensis to Jeremy Bentham, and became in 1823 editor of the
_Globe_.
[2] John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852), best known for his friendship
and correspondence with Keats. His narrative verse founded on the
tales of Boccaccio appeared in 1821 as _The Garden of Florence and
other Poems_. He wrote some admirable sonnets, one of which is
addressed to Keats.
HUNT, ROBERT (1807-1887), English natural philosopher, was born at
Devonport on the 6th of September 1807. His father, a naval officer, was
drowned while Robert was a youth. He began to study in London for the
medical profession, but ill-health caused him to return to the west of
England, and in 1840 he became secretary to the Royal Cornwall
Polytechnic Society at Falmouth. Here he was brought into contact with
Robert Were Fox, and carried on some physical and chemical
investigations with him. He took up photography with great zeal,
following Daguerre's discovery, and introducing new processes. His
_Manual of Photography_ (1841, ed. 5, 1857) was the first English
treatise on the subject. He also experimented generally on the action of
light, and published _Researches on Light_ (1844). In 1845 he accepted
the invitation of Sir Henry de la Beche to become keeper of mining
records at the Museum of Economic (afterwards "Practical") Geology, and
when the school of mines was established in 1851 he lectured for two
years on mechanical science, and afterwards for a short time on
experimental physics. His principal work was the collection and editing
of the _Mineral Statistics_ of the United Kingdom, and this he continued
to the date of his retirement (1883), when the mining record office was
transferred to the Home Office. He was elected F.R.S. in 1854. In 1884
he published a large volume on _British Mining_, in which the subject
was dealt with very fully from an historical as well as a practical
point of view. He also edited the fifth and some later editions of Ure's
_Dictionary of Arts, Mines and Manufactures_. He died in London on the
17th of October 1887. A mineralogical museum at Redruth has been
established in his memory.
HUNT, THOMAS STERRY (1826-1892), American geologist and chemist, was
born at Norwich, Conn., on the 5th of September 1826. He lost his father
when twelve years old, and had to earn his own livelihood. In the course
of two years he found employment in a printing office, in an
apothecary's shop, in a book store and as a clerk. He became interested
in natural science, and especially in chemical and medical studies, and
in 1845 he was elected a member of the Association of American
Geologists and Naturalists at Yale--a body which four years later became
the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1848 he read
a paper in Philadelphia _On Acid Springs and Gypsum Deposits of the
Onondaga Salt Group_. At Yale he became assistant to Professor B.
Silliman, Jun., and in 1846 was appointed chemist to the Geological
Survey of Vermont. In 1847 he was appointed to similar duties on the
Canadian Geological Survey at Montreal under Sir William Logan, and this
post he held until 1872. In 1859 he was elected F.R.S., and he was one
of the original members and president of the Royal Society of Canada. He
was a frequent contributor to scientific journals, writing on the
crystalline limestones, the origin of continents, the chemistry of the
primeval earth, on serpentines, &c. He also wrote a notable "Essay on
the History of the names Cambrian and Silurian" (_Canadian Naturalist_,
1872), in which the claims of Sedgwick, with respect to the grouping of
the Cambrian strata, were forcibly advocated. He died in New York City
on the 12th of February 1892.
His publications include _Chemical and Geological Essays_ (1875, ed.
2, 1879); _Mineral Physiology and Physiography_ (1886); _A New Basis
for Chemistry_ (1887, ed. 3, 1891); _Systematic Mineralogy_ (1891).
See an obituary notice by Persifor Frazer, _Amer. Geologist_ (xi. Jan.
1893), with portrait.
HUNT, WILLIAM HENRY (1790-1864), English water-colour painter, was born
near Long Acre, London, on the 28th of March 1790. He was apprenticed
about 1805 to John Varley, the landscape-painter, with whom he remained
five or six years, exhibiting three oil pictures at the Royal Academy in
1807. He was early connected with the Society of Painters in
Water-colour, of which body, then in a transition state, he was elected
associate in 1824, and full member in 1827. To its exhibitions he was
until the year of his death one of the most prolific contributors. Many
years of Hunt's uneventful and industrious life were passed at Hastings.
He died of apoplexy on the 10th of February 1864. Hunt was one of the
creators of the English school of water-colour painting. His subjects,
especially those of his later life, are extremely simple; but, by the
delicacy, humour and fine power of their treatment, they rank second to
works of the highest art only. Considered technically, his works exhibit
all the resources of the water-colour painter's craft, from the purest
transparent tinting to the boldest use of body-colour, rough paper and
scraping for texture. His sense of colour is perhaps as true as that of
any English artist. "He was," says Ruskin, "take him for all in all, the
finest painter of still life that ever existed." Several characteristic
examples of Hunt's work, as the "Boy and Goat," "Brown Study" and
"Plums, Primroses and Birds' Nests" are in the Victoria and Albert
Museum.
HUNT, WILLIAM HOLMAN (1827-1910), English artist, was born in London on
the 2nd of April 1827. An ancestor on his father's side bore arms
against Charles I., and went over to Holland, where he fought in the
Protestant cause. He returned with William III., but the family failed
to recover their property. Holman Hunt's father was the manager of a
city warehouse, with tastes superior to his position in life. He loved
books and pictures, and encouraged his son to pursue art as an
amusement, though not as a profession. At the age of twelve and a half
Holman Hunt was placed in a city office, but he employed his leisure in
reading, drawing and painting, and at sixteen began an independent
career as an artist. When he was between seventeen and eighteen he
entered the Royal Academy schools, where he soon made acquaintance with
his lifelong friend John Everett Millais, then a boy of fifteen. In 1846
Holman Hunt sent to the Royal Academy his first picture ("Hark!"), which
was followed by "Dr Rochecliffe performing Divine Service in the Cottage
of Joceline Joliffe at Woodstock," in 1847, and "The Flight of Madeline
and Porphyrio" (from Keats's _Eve of St Agnes_) in 1848. In this year he
and Millais, with the co-operation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others,
initiated the famous Pre-Raphaelite movement in art. Typical examples of
the new creed were furnished in the next year's Academy by Millais's
"Isabella" and Holman Hunt's "Rienzi vowing to obtain Justice for the
Death of his Young Brother." This last pathetic picture, which was sold
to Mr Gibbons for L105, was followed in 1850 by "A Converted British
Family sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the
Druids" (bought by Mr Combe, of the Clarendon Press, Oxford, for L150),
and in 1851 by "Valentine protecting Sylvia from Proteus." This scene
from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ was very warmly praised by Ruskin (in
letters to _The Times_), who declared that as studies both of drapery
and of every minor detail there had been nothing in art so earnest and
complete since the days of Albert Durer. It gained a prize at Liverpool,
and is reckoned as the finest of Holman Hunt's earlier works. In 1852 he
exhibited "A Hireling Shepherd." "Claudio and Isabella," from _Measure
for Measure_, and a brilliant study of the Downs near Hastings, called
in the catalogue "Our English Coasts, 1852" (since generally known as
"Strayed Sheep"), were exhibited in 1853. For three of his works Holman
Hunt was awarded prizes of L50 and L60 at Liverpool and Birmingham, but
in 1851 he had become so discouraged by the difficulty of selling his
pictures, that he had resolved to give up art and learn farming, with a
view to emigration. In 1854 he achieved his first great success by the
famous picture of "The Light of the World," an allegorical
representation of Christ knocking at the door of the human soul. This
work produced perhaps the greatest effect of any religious painting of
the century. "For the first time in England," wrote William Bell Scott,
"a picture became a subject of conversation and general interest from
one end of the island to the other, and indeed continued so for many
years." "The Awakening Conscience," exhibited at the same time, depicted
a tragic moment in a life of sin, when a girl, stricken with memories of
her innocent childhood, rises suddenly from the knees of her paramour.
The inner meaning of both these pictures was explained by Ruskin in
letters to _The Times_ in May 1854. "The Light of the World" was
purchased by Mr Combe, and was given by his wife to Keble College. In
1904 Holman Hunt completed a second "Light of the World," slightly
altered from the original, the execution of which was due to his
dissatisfaction with the way in which the Keble picture was shown there;
and he intended the second edition of it for as wide public exhibition
as possible. It was acquired by Mr Charles Booth, who arranged for the
exhibition of the new "Light of the World" in all the large cities of
the colonies.
In January 1854 Holman Hunt left England for Syria and Palestine with
the desire to revivify on canvas the facts of Scripture history,
"surrounded by the very people and circumstances of the life in Judaea
of old days." The first fruit of this idea, which may be said to have
dominated the artist's life, was "The Scapegoat," a solitary outcast
animal standing alone on the salt-encrusted shores of the Dead Sea, with
the mountains of Edom in the distance, seen under a gorgeous effect of
purple evening light. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856,
together with three Eastern landscapes. His next picture (1860), one of
the most elaborate and most successful of his works, was "The Finding of
our Saviour in the Temple." Like all his important pictures, it was the
work of years. Many causes contributed to the delay in its completion,
including a sentence of what was tantamount to excommunication
(afterwards revoked) passed on all Jews acting as models. Thousands
crowded to see this picture, which was exhibited in London and in many
English provincial towns. It was purchased for L5500, and is now in the
Birmingham Municipal Art Gallery. Holman Hunt's next great religious
picture was "The Shadow of Death" (exhibited separately in 1873), an
imaginary incident in the life of our Lord, who, lifting His arms with
weariness after labour in His workshop, throws a shadow on the wall as
of a man crucified, which is perceived by His mother. This work was
presented to Manchester by Sir William Agnew. Meanwhile there had
appeared at the Royal Academy in 1861 "A Street in Cairo: The
Lanternmaker's Courtship," and in 1863 "The King of Hearts," and a
portrait of the Right Hon. Stephen Lushington, D.C.L. In 1866 came
"Isabella and the Pot of Basil," "London Bridge on the Night of the
Marriage of the Prince of Wales," and "The Afterglow." In 1867 Holman
Hunt sent a charming head of "A Tuscan Girl" to the Grosvenor Gallery
and two pictures to the Royal Academy. These were "Il dolce far niente"
and a lifelike study of pigeons in rain called "The Festival of St
Swithin," now in the Taylor Building, Oxford, with many others of this
artist's work. After two years' absence Holman Hunt returned to
Jerusalem in 1875, where he was engaged upon his great picture of "The
Triumph of the Innocents," which proved to be the most serious labour of
his life. The subject is an imaginary episode of the flight into Egypt,
in which the Holy Family are attended by a procession of the Holy
Innocents, marching along the waters of life and illuminated with
unearthly light. Its execution was delayed by an extraordinary chapter
of accidents. For months Holman Hunt waited in vain for the arrival of
his materials, and at last he unfortunately began on an unsuitable piece
of linen procured in despair at Jerusalem. Other troubles supervened,
and when he arrived in England he found his picture in such a state that
he was compelled to abandon it and begin again. The new version of the
work, which is somewhat larger and changed in several points, was not
completed till 1885. Meanwhile the old picture was relined and so
skilfully treated that the artist was able to complete it
satisfactorily, and there are now two pictures entitled "The Triumph of
the Innocents," one in the Liverpool, the other in the Birmingham Art
Gallery. The pictures exhibited between 1875 and 1885 included "The
Ship," a realistic picture of the deck of a passenger ship by night
(1878), and portraits of his son (1880), Sir Richard Owen (1881) and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1884). All of these were exhibited at the
Grosvenor Gallery, where they were followed by "The Bride of Bethlehem"
(1885), "Amaryllis" and a portrait of his son (tracing a drawing on a
window) in 1886. His most important later work is "May-Day, Magdalen
Tower," a record of the service of song which has been held on the tower
of Magdalen, Oxford, at sunrise on May-Day from time immemorial. The
subject had interested the artist for a great many years, and, after
"The Triumph of the Innocents" was completed, he worked at it with his
usual devotion, climbing up the tower for weeks together in the early
morning to study the sunrise from the top. This radiant poem of the
simplest and purest devotion was exhibited at the Gainsborough Gallery
in Old Bond Street in 1891. He continued to send occasional
contributions to the exhibitions of the Royal Water-Colour Society, to
the New Gallery and to the New English Art Club. One of the most
remarkable of his later works (New Gallery, 1899) is "The Miracle of
Sacred Fire in the Church of the Sepulchre, Jerusalem."
By his strong and constant individuality, no less than by his peculiar
methods of work, Holman Hunt holds a somewhat isolated position among
artists. He remained entirely unaffected by all the various movements in
the art-world after 1850. His ambition was always "to serve as high
priest and expounder of the excellence of the works of the Creator." He
spent too much labour on each work to complete many; but perhaps no
painter of the 19th century produced so great an impression by a few
pictures as the painter of "The Light of the World," "The Scapegoat,"
"The Finding of our Saviour in the Temple" and "The Triumph of the
Innocents"; and his greatness was recognized by his inclusion in the
Order of Merit. His _History of Pre-Raphaelitism_, a subject on which he
could speak as a first authority, but not without dissent from at least
one living member of the P.R.B., was published in 1905. On the 7th of
September 1910 he died in London, and on September 12th his remains,
after cremation at Golder's Green, were buried in St Paul's Cathedral,
with national honours.
See Archdeacon Farrar and Mrs Alice Meynell, "William Holman Hunt, his
Life and Work" (_Art Annual_) (London, 1893); John Ruskin, _Modern
Painters; The Art of England_ (Lecture) [consult Gordon Crauford's
_Ruskin's Notes on the Pictures of Mr Holman Hunt_, 1886]; Robert de
la Sizeranne, _La Peinture anglaise contemporaine_ (Paris, 1895); W.
B. Scott, _Autobiographical Notes_; W. M. Rossetti, _Pre-Raphaelite
Diaries and Letters_; Percy H. Bate, _The Pre-Raphaelite Painters_
(1899); Sir W. Bayliss, _Five Great Painters of the Victorian Era_
(1902). (C. Mo.)
HUNT, WILLIAM MORRIS (1824-1879), American painter, was born at
Brattleboro, Vermont, on the 31st of March 1824. His father's family
were large landowners in the state. He was for a time (1840) at Harvard,
but his real education began when he accompanied his mother and brother
to Europe, where he studied with Couture in Paris and then came under
the influence of Jean Francois Millet. The companionship of Millet had a
lasting influence on Hunt's character and style, and his work grew in
strength, in beauty and in seriousness. He was the real introducer of
the Barbizon school to America, and he more than any other turned the
rising generation of American painters towards Paris. On his return in
1855 he painted some of his most beautiful pictures, all reminiscent of
his life in France and of Millet's influence. Such are "The Belated
Kid," "Girl at the Fountain," "Hurdy-Gurdy Boy," &c. But the public
called for portraits, and it became the fashion to sit to him, among his
best paintings in this kind being those of William M. Evarts, Mrs
Charles Francis Adams, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, William H.
Gardner, Chief Justice Shaw and Judge Horace Gray. Unfortunately many of
his paintings and sketches, together with five large Millets and other
art treasures collected by him in Europe, were destroyed in the great
Boston fire of 1872. Among his later works American landscapes
predominated. They also include the "Bathers"--twice painted--and the
allegories for the senate chamber of the State Capitol at Albany, N.Y.,
now lost by the disintegration of the stone panels on which they were
painted. Hunt was drowned at the Isles of Shoals on the 8th of September
1879. His book, _Talks about Art_ (London, 1878), is well known.
His brother, RICHARD MORRIS HUNT (1828-1895), the famous architect, was
born in Brattleboro, Vermont, on the 31st of October 1828. He studied in
Europe (1843-1854), mainly in the Ecole des Beaux Arts at Paris, and in
1854 was appointed inspector of works on the buildings connecting the
Tuileries with the Louvre. Under Hector Lefuel he designed the Pavilion
de la Bibliotheque, opposite the Palais Royal. In 1855 he returned to
New York, and was employed on the extension of the Capitol at
Washington. He designed the Lenox Library, the Stuyvesant and the
_Tribune_ buildings in New York; the theological library, and Marquand
chapel at Princeton; the Divinity College and the Scroll and Key
building at Yale; the Vanderbilt mausoleum on Staten Island, and the
Yorktown monument. For the Administration Building at the World's
Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 Hunt received the gold medal of
the Institute of British Architects. Among the most noteworthy of his
domestic buildings were the residences of W. K. Vanderbilt and Henry G.
Marquand in New York City; George W. Vanderbilt's country house at
Biltmore, and several of the large "cottages" at Newport, R.I.,
including "Marble House" and "The Breakers." He was one of three foreign
members of the Italian Society of St Luke, an honorary and corresponding
member of the Academie des Beaux Arts and of the Royal Institute of
British Architects, and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He was the
first to command respect in foreign countries for American architecture,
and was the leader of a school that has established in the United
States the manner and the traditions of the Beaux Arts. He took a
prominent part in the founding of the American Institute of Architects,
and, from 1888, was its president. His talent was eminently practical;
and he was almost equally successful in the ornate style of the early
Renaissance in France, in the picturesque style of his comfortable
villas, and the monumental style of the Lenox Library. There is a
beautiful memorial to Hunt in the wall of Central Park, opposite this
building, erected in 1898 by the associated art and architectural
societies of New York, from designs by Daniel C. French and Bruce Price.
He died on the 31st of July 1895.
HUNTER, JOHN (1728-1793), British physiologist and surgeon, was born on
the 13th[1] of February 1728, at Long Calderwood, in the parish of East
Kilbride, Lanarkshire, being the youngest of the ten children of John
and Agnes Hunter. His father, who died on the 30th of October 1741,[2]
aged 78, was descended from the old Ayrshire family of Hunter of
Hunterston, and his mother was the daughter of a Mr Paul, treasurer of
Glasgow. Hunter is said to have made little progress at school, being
averse to its restraints and pursuits, and fond of country amusements.
When seventeen years old he went to Glasgow, where for a short time he
assisted his brother-in-law, Mr Buchanan, a cabinetmaker. Being desirous
at length of some settled occupation, he obtained from his brother
William (q.v.) permission to aid, under Mr Symonds, in making
dissections in his anatomical school, then the most celebrated in
London, intending, should he be unsuccessful there, to enter the army.
He arrived accordingly in the metropolis in September 1748, about a
fortnight before the beginning of his brother's autumnal course of
lectures. After succeeding beyond expectation with the dissection of the
muscles of an arm, he was entrusted with a similar part injected, and
from the excellence of his second essay Dr Hunter predicted that he
would become a good anatomist. Seemingly John Hunter had hitherto
received no instruction in preparation for the special course of life
upon which he had entered.
Hard-working, and singularly patient and skilful in dissection, Hunter
had by his second winter in London acquired sufficient anatomical
knowledge to be entrusted with the charge of his brother's practical
class. In the summer months of 1749-1750, at Chelsea Military Hospital,
he attended the lectures and operations of William Cheselden, on whose
retirement in the following year he became a surgeon's pupil at St
Bartholomew's, where Percivall Pott was one of the senior surgeons. In
the summer of 1752 he visited Scotland. Sir Everard Home and, following
him, Drewry Ottley state that Hunter began in 1754 to assist his brother
as his partner in lecturing; according, however, to the _European
Magazine_ for 1782, the office of lecturer was offered to Hunter by his
brother in 1758, but declined by him on account of the "insuperable
embarrassments and objections" which he felt to speaking in public. In
1754 he became a surgeon's pupil at St George's Hospital, where he was
appointed house-surgeon in 1756.[3] During the period of his connexion
with Dr Hunter's school he, in addition to other labours, solved the
problem of the descent of the testis in the foetus, traced the
ramifications of the nasal and olfactory nerves within the nose,
experimentally tested the question whether veins could act as
absorbents, studied the formation of pus and the nature of the placental
circulation, and with his brother earned the chief merit of practically
proving the function and importance of the lymphatics in the animal
economy. On the 5th of June 1755,[4] he was induced to enter as a
gentleman commoner at St Mary's Hall, Oxford, but his instincts would
not permit him, to use his own expression, "to stuff Latin and Greek at
the university." Some three and thirty years later he thus significantly
wrote of an opponent: "Jesse Foot accuses me of not understanding the
dead languages; but I could teach him that on the dead body which he
never knew in any language dead or living."[5] Doubtless, however,
linguistic studies would have served to correct in him what was perhaps
a natural defect--a difficulty in the presentation of abstract ideas not
wholly attributable to the novelty of his doctrines.
An attack of inflammation of the lungs in the spring of 1759 having
produced symptoms threatening consumption, by which the promising
medical career of his brother James had been cut short, Hunter obtained
in October 1760 the appointment of staff-surgeon in Hodgson and Keppel's
expedition to Belleisle. With this he sailed in 1761. In the following
year he served with the English forces on the frontier of Portugal.
Whilst with the army he acquired the extensive knowledge of gunshot
wounds embodied in his important treatise (1794) on that subject, in
which, amongst other matters of moment, he insists on the rejection of
the indiscriminate practice of dilating with the knife followed almost
universally by surgeons of his time. When not engaged in the active
duties of his profession, he occupied himself with physiological and
other scientific researches. Thus, in 1761, off Belleisle, the
conditions of the coagulation of the blood were among the subjects of
his inquiries.[6] Later, on land, he continued the study of human
anatomy, and arranged his notes and memoranda on inflammation; he also
ascertained by experiment that digestion does not take place in snakes
and lizards during hibernation, and observed that enforced vigorous
movement at that season proves fatal to such animals, the waste so
occasioned not being compensated, whence he drew the inference that, in
the diminution of the power of a part attendant on mortification, resort
to stimulants which increase action without giving real strength is
inadvisable.[7] A MS. catalogue by Hunter, probably written soon after
his return from Portugal, shows that he had already made a collection of
about two hundred specimens of natural and morbid structures.
On arriving in England early in 1763, Hunter, having retired from the
army on half-pay, took a house in Golden Square, and began the career of
a London surgeon. Most of the metropolitan practice at the time was held
by P. Pott, C. Hawkins, Samuel Sharp, Joseph Warner and Robert Adair;
and Hunter sought to eke out his at first slender income by teaching
practical anatomy and operative surgery to a private class. His leisure
was devoted to the study of comparative anatomy, to procure subjects for
which he obtained the refusal of animals dying in the Tower menagerie
and in various travelling zoological collections. In connexion with his
rupture of a tendo Achillis,[8] in 1767, he performed on dogs several
experiments which, with the illustrations in his museum of the reunion
of such structures after division, laid the foundation of the modern
practice of cutting through tendons (tenotomy) for the relief of
distorted and contracted joints. In the same year he was elected F.R.S.
His first contribution to the _Philosophical Transactions_, with the
exception of a supplement to a paper by J. Ellis in the volume for
1766, was an essay on post-mortem digestion of the stomach, written at
the request of Sir J. Pringle, and read on the 18th of June 1772, in
which he explained that phenomenon as a result of the action of the
gastric juice.[9] On the 9th of December 1768 he was elected a surgeon
to St George's Hospital, and, soon after, a member of the Corporation of
Surgeons. He now began to take house-pupils. Among these were Edward
Jenner, who came to him in 1770, and until the time of Hunter's death
corresponded with him on the most intimate and affectionate terms, W.
Guy, Dr P. S. Physick of Philadelphia, and Everard Home, his
brother-in-law. William Lynn and Sir A. Carlisle, though not inmates of
his house, were frequent visitors there. His pupils at St George's
included John Abernethy, Henry Cline, James Earle and Astley Cooper. In
1770 he settled in Jermyn Street, in the house which his brother William
had previously occupied; and in July 1771 he married Anne, the eldest
daughter of Robert Home, surgeon to Burgoyne's regiment of light
horse.[10]
From 1772 till his death Hunter resided during autumn at a house built
by him at Earl's Court, Brompton, where most of his biological
researches were carried on. There he kept for the purpose of study and
experiment the fishes, lizards, blackbirds, hedgehogs and other animals
sent him from time to time by Jenner; tame pheasants and partridges, at
least one eagle, toads, silkworms, and many more creatures, obtained
from every quarter of the globe. Bees he had under observation in his
conservatory for upwards of twenty years; hornets and wasps were also
diligently studied by him. On two occasions his life was in risk from
his pets--once in wrestling with a young bull, and again when he
fearlessly took back to their dens two leopards which had broken loose
among his dogs.
Choosing intuitively the only true method of philosophical discovery,
Hunter, ever cautious of confounding fact and hypothesis, besought of
nature the truth through the medium of manifold experiments and
observations. "He had never read Bacon," says G. G. Babington, "but his
mode of studying nature was as strictly Baconian as if he had."[11] To
Jenner, who had offered a conjectural explanation of a phenomenon, he
writes, on the 2nd of August 1775: "I think your solution is just; but
why think? why not try the experiment? Repeat all the experiments upon a
hedgehog[12] as soon as you receive this, and they will give you the
solution." It was his axiom however, "that experiments should not be
often repeated which tend merely to establish a principle already known
and admitted, but that the next step should be the application of that
principle to useful purposes" ("Anim. Oecon.," _Works_, iv. 86). During
fifteen years he kept a flock of geese simply in order to acquaint
himself with the development of birds in eggs, with reference to which
he remarked: "It would almost appear that this mode of propagation was
intended for investigation." In his toxicological and other researches,
in which his experience had led him to believe that the effects of
noxious drugs are nearly similar in the brute creation and in man, he
had already, in 1780, as he states, "poisoned some thousands of
animals."[13]
By inserting shot at definite distances in the leg-bones of young pigs,
and also by feeding them with madder, by which all fresh osseous
deposits are tinged,[14] Hunter obtained evidence that bones increase in
size, not by the intercalation of new amongst old particles, as had been
imagined by H. L. Duhamel du Monceau, but by means of additions to their
extremities and circumference, excess of calcareous tissue being removed
by the absorbents. Some of his most extraordinary experiments were to
illustrate the relation of the strength of constitution to sex. He
exchanged the spurs of a young cock and a young pullet, and found that
on the former the transplanted structure grew to a fair size, on the
latter but little; whereas a spur from one leg of a cock transferred to
its comb, a part well supplied with blood, grew more than twice as fast
as that left on the other leg. Another experiment of his, which required
many trials for success, was the engrafting of a human incisor on the
comb of a cock.[15] The uniting of parts of different animals when
brought into contact he attributed to the production of adhesive instead
of suppurative inflammation, owing to their possession of "the simple
living principle."[16] The effects of habit upon structure were
illustrated by Hunter's observation that in a sea-gull which he had
brought to feed on barley the muscular parietes of the gizzard became
greatly thickened. A similar phenomenon was noticed by him in the case
of other carnivorous birds fed on a vegetable diet.
It was in 1772 that Hunter, in order effectually to gauge the extent of
his own knowledge, and also correctly to express his views, which had
been repeatedly misstated or ascribed to others, began his lectures on
the theory and practice of surgery, at first delivered free to his
pupils and a few friends, but subsequent to 1774 on the usual terms,
four guineas. Though Pott, indeed, had perceived that the only true
system of surgery is that which most closely accords with the curative
efforts of nature, a rational pathology can hardly be said to have had
at this time any existence; and it was generally assumed that a
knowledge of anatomy alone was a sufficient foundation for the study of
surgery. Hunter, unlike his contemporaries, to most of whom his
philosophic habit of thought was a mystery, and whose books contained
little else than relations of cases and modes of treatment, sought the
reason for each phenomenon that came under his notice. The principles of
surgery, he maintained, are not less necessary to be understood than the
principles of other sciences; unless, indeed, the surgeon should wish to
resemble "the Chinese philosopher whose knowledge consisted only in
facts." Too much attention, he remarked, cannot be paid to facts; yet a
multitude of facts overcrowd the memory without advantage if they do not
lead us to establish principles, by an acquaintance with which we learn
the causes of diseases. Hunter's course, which latterly comprised
eighty-six lectures, delivered on alternate evenings between the hours
of seven and eight, lasted from October to April. Some teachers of his
time were content to dismiss the subjects of anatomy and surgery in a
course of only six weeks' duration. His class was usually small and
never exceeded thirty. He was deficient in the gifts of a good extempore
speaker, being in this respect a remarkable contrast to his brother
William; and he read his lectures, seldom raising his eyes from the
manuscript. His manner with his auditory is stated to have been
embarrassed and awkward, or, as Adams puts it (_Obs. on Morbid Pois._,
p. 272), "frequently ungraceful," and his language always unadorned; but
that his "expressions for the explaining of his new theories rendered
his lectures often unintelligible" is scarcely evident in his pupils'
notes still extant. His own and others' errors and fallacies were
exposed with equal freedom in his teaching. Occasionally he would tell
his pupils, "You had better not write down that observation, for very
likely I shall think differently next year"; and once in answer to a
question he replied, "Never ask me what I have said or what I have
written; but, if you will ask me what my present opinions are, I will
tell you."
In January 1776 Hunter was appointed surgeon-extraordinary to the king.
He began in the same year his Croonian lectures on muscular motion,
continued annually, except in 1777, till 1782: they were never published
by him, being in his opinion too incomplete. In 1778 appeared the second
part of his _Treatise on the Natural History of the Human Teeth_, the
first part of which was published in 1771. It was in the waste of the
dental alveoli and of the fangs of shedding teeth that in 1754-1755, as
he tells us, he received his first hint of the use of the absorbents.
Abernethy (_Physiological Lectures_, p. 196) relates that Hunter, being
once asked how he could suppose it possible for absorbents to do such
things as he attributed to them, replied, "Nay, I know not, unless they
possess powers similar to those which a caterpillar exerts when feeding
on a leaf." Hunter in 1780 read before the Royal Society a paper in
which he laid claim to have been the first to make out the nature of the
utero-placental circulation. His brother William, who had five years
previously described the same in his _Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus_,
thereupon wrote to the Society attributing to himself this honour. John
Hunter in a rejoinder to his brother's letter, dated the 17th of
February 1780, reiterated his former statement, viz. that his discovery,
on the evening of the day in 1754 that he had made it in a specimen
injected by a Dr Mackenzie, had been communicated by him to Dr Hunter.
Thus arose an estrangement between the two Hunters, which continued
until the time of William's last illness, when his brother obtained
permission to visit him.
In 1783 Hunter was elected a member of the Royal Society of Medicine and
of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris, and took part in the formation
of "A Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical
Knowledge."[17] It appears from a letter by Hunter that in the latter
part of 1783, he, with Jenner, had the subject of colour-blindness under
consideration. As in that year the lease of his premises in Jermyn
Street was to expire, he purchased the twenty-four years' leasehold of
two houses, the one on the east side of Leicester Square, the other in
Castle Street with intervening ground. Between the houses he built in
1783-1785, at an expense of above L3000, a museum for his anatomical and
other collections which by 1782 had cost him L10,000. The new edifice
consisted of a hall 52 ft. long by 28 ft. wide, and lighted from the
top, with a gallery all round, and having beneath it a lecture theatre.
In April 1785 Hunter's collections were removed into it under the
superintendence of Home and William Bell,[18] and another assistant,
Andre. Among the foreigners of distinction who inspected the museum,
which was now shown by Hunter twice a year--in October to medical men,
and in May to other visitors--were J. F. Blumenbach, P. Camper and A.
Scarpa. In the acquisition of subjects for his varied biological
investigations and of specimens for his museum, expense was a matter of
small moment with Hunter. Thus he endeavoured, at his own cost, to
obtain information respecting the Cetacea by sending out a surgeon to
the North in a Greenland whaler. He is said, moreover, to have given, in
June 1783, L500 for the body of O'Brien, or Byrne, the Irish giant,
whose skeleton, 7 ft. 7 in. high, is so conspicuous an object in the
museum of the College of Surgeons of London.[19]
Hunter, who in the spring of 1769-1772 had suffered from gout, in spring
1773 from spasm apparently in the pyloric region, accompanied by failure
of the heart's action (Ottley, _Life_, p. 44), and in 1777 from vertigo
with symptoms of angina pectoris, had in 1783 another attack of the last
mentioned complaint, to which he was henceforward subject when under
anxiety or excitement of mind.
In May 1785,[20] chiefly to oblige William Sharp the engraver, Hunter
consented to have his portrait taken by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He proved a
bad sitter, and Reynolds made little satisfactory progress, till one day
Hunter, while resting his somewhat upraised head on his left hand, fell
into a profound reverie--one of those waking dreams, seemingly, which in
his lectures he has so well described, when "the body loses the
consciousness of its own existence."[21] The painter had now before him
the man he would fain depict, and, turning his canvas upside down, he
sketched out the admirable portrait which, afterwards skilfully restored
by H. Farrar, is in the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons. A
copy by Jackson, acquired from Lady Bell, is to be seen at the National
Portrait Gallery, and St Mary's Hall, Oxford, also possesses a copy.
Sharp's engraving of the original, published in 1788, is one of the
finest of his productions. The volumes seen in Reynolds' picture are a
portion of the unpublished records of anatomical researches left by
Hunter at his death, which, with other manuscripts, Sir Everard Home in
1812 removed from his museum, and eventually, in order, it has been
supposed, to keep secret the source of many of his papers in the
_Philosophical Transactions_, and of facts mentioned in his lectures,
committed to the flames.[22]
Among the subjects of Hunter's physiological investigation in 1785 was
the mode of growth of deer's antlers. As he possessed the privilege of
making experiments on the deer in Richmond Park, he in July of that year
had a buck there caught and thrown, and tied one of its external carotid
arteries. He observed that the antler which obtained its blood supply
therefrom, then half-grown, became in consequence cold to the touch.
Hunter debated with himself whether it would be shed in due time, or be
longer retained than ordinarily. To his surprise he found, on
re-examining the antler a week or two later, when the wound around the
ligatured artery was healed, that it had regained its warmth, and was
still increasing in size. Had, then, his operation been in some way
defective? To determine this question, the buck was killed and sent to
Leicester Fields. On examination Hunter ascertained that the external
carotid had been duly tied, but that certain small branches of the
artery above and below the ligature had enlarged, and by their
anastomoses had restored the blood supply of the growing part. Thus it
was evident that under "the stimulus of necessity," to use a phrase of
the experimenter, the smaller arterial channels are capable of rapid
increase in dimensions to perform the offices of the larger.[23] It
happened that, in the ensuing December, there lay in one of the wards of
St George's Hospital a patient admitted for popliteal aneurism. The
disease must soon prove fatal unless by some means arrested. Should the
surgeon, following the usual and commonly fatal method of treatment, cut
down upon the tumour, and, after tying the artery above and below it,
evacuate its contents? Or should he adopt the procedure, deemed by Pott
generally advisable, of amputating the limb above it? It was Hunter's
aim in his practice, even if he could not dispense with the necessity,
at least to diminish the severity of operations, which he considered
were an acknowledgment of the imperfection of the art of healing, and
compared to "the acts of the armed savage, who attempts to get that by
force which a civilized man would get by stratagem." Since, he argued,
the experiment with the buck had shown that collateral vessels are
capable of continuing the circulation when passage through a main trunk
is arrested, why should he not, in the aneurism case, leaving the
absorbents to deal with the contents of the tumour, tie the artery in
the sound parts, where it is tied in amputation, and preserve the limb?
Acting upon this idea, he ligatured his patient's femoral artery in the
lower part of its course in the thigh, in the fibrous sheath enclosing
the space since known as "Hunter's canal."[24] The leg was found, some
hours after the operation, to have acquired a temperature even above the
normal.[25] At the end of January 1786, that is, in six weeks' time, the
patient was well enough to be able to leave the hospital. Thus it was
that Hunter inaugurated an operation which has been the means of
preserving to hundreds life with integrity of limb--an operation which,
as the Italian P. Assalini, who saw it first performed, testifies,
"excited the greatest wonder, and awakened the attention of all the
surgeons in Europe."
Early in 1786 Hunter published his _Treatise on the Venereal Disease_,
which, like some of his previous writings, was printed in his own house.
Without the aid of the booksellers, 1000 copies of it were sold within a
twelvemonth. Although certain views therein expressed with regard to the
relationship of syphilis have been proved erroneous, the work is a
valuable compendium of observations of cases and modes of treatment (cf.
John Hilton, _Hunt. Orat._ p. 40). Towards the end of the year appeared
his _Observations on certain parts of the Animal Oeconomy_, which,
besides the more important of his contributions to the _Philosophical
Transactions_, contains nine papers on various subjects. In 1786 Hunter
became deputy surgeon-general to the army; his appointment as
surgeon-general and as inspector-general of hospitals followed in 1790.
In 1787 he received the Royal Society's Copley medal, and was also
elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. On account of
the increase in his practice and his impaired health, he now obtained
the services of Home as his assistant at St George's Hospital. The death
of Pott in December 1788 secured to him the undisputed title of the
first surgeon in England. He resigned to Home, in 1792, the delivery of
his surgical lectures, in order to devote himself more fully to the
completion of his _Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gunshot
Wounds_, which was published by his executors in 1794. In this, his
masterpiece, the application of physiology to practice is especially
noticeable. Certain experiments described in the first part, which
demonstrate that arterialization of the blood in respiration takes place
by a process of diffusion of "pure air" or "vital air" (i.e. oxygen)
through membrane, were made so early as the summer of 1755.
Hunter in 1792 announced to his colleagues at St George's, who, he
considered, neglected the proper instruction of the students under their
charge, his intention no longer to divide with them the fees which he
received for his hospital pupils. Against this innovation, however, the
governors of the hospital decided in March 1793. Subsequently, by a
committee of their appointing, a code of rules respecting pupils was
promulgated, one clause of which, probably directed against an
occasional practice of Hunter's, stipulated that no person should be
admitted as a student of the hospital without certificates that he had
been educated for the medical profession. In the autumn two young
Scotchmen, ignorant of the new rule, came up to town and applied to
Hunter for admission as his pupils at St George's. Hunter explained to
them how he was situated, but promised to advance their request at the
next board meeting at the hospital on the 16th of October. On that day,
having finished a difficult piece of dissection, he went down to
breakfast in excellent spirits and in his usual health. After making a
professional call, he attended the board meeting. There the interruption
of his remarks in behalf of his applicants by a flat contradiction from
a colleague brought on one of the old spasmodic heart attacks; he ceased
speaking, and retired into an adjoining room only to fall lifeless into
the arms of Dr Robertson, one of the hospital physicians. After an hour
had been spent in vain attempts to restore animation, his body was
conveyed to his house in a sedan chair.[26] His remains were interred
privately on the 22nd of October 1793, in the vaults of St Martin's in
the Fields. Thence, on the 28th of March 1859, through the
instrumentality of F. T. Buckland, they were removed to Abbot Islip's
chapel in Westminster Abbey, to be finally deposited in the grave in the
north aisle of the nave, close to the resting-place of Ben Jonson.
Hunter was of about medium height, strongly built and high-shouldered
and short-necked. He had an open countenance, and large features, eyes
light-blue or grey, eyebrows prominent, and hair reddish-yellow in
youth, later white, and worn curled behind; and he dressed plainly and
neatly. He rose at or before six, dissected till nine (his breakfast
hour), received patients from half-past nine till twelve, at least
during the latter part of his life, and saw his outdoor and hospital
patients till about four, when he dined, taking, according to Home, as
at other meals in the twenty years preceding his death, no wine. After
dinner he slept an hour; he then superintended experiments, read or
prepared his lectures, and made, usually by means of an amanuensis,
records of the day's dissections. "I never could understand," says W.
Clift, "how Mr Hunter obtained rest: when I left him at midnight, it
was with a lamp fresh trimmed for further study, and with the usual
appointment to meet him again at six in the morning." H. Leigh Thomas
records[27] that, on his first arrival in London, having by desire
called on Hunter at five o'clock in the morning, he found him already
busily engaged in the dissection of insects. Rigidly economical of
time, Hunter was always at work, and he had always in view some fresh
enterprise. To his museum he gave a very large share of his attention,
being fearful lest the ordering of it should be incomplete at his
death, and knowing of none who could continue his work for him. "When
I am dead," said he one day to Dr Maxwell Garthshore, "you will not
soon meet with another John Hunter." At the time of his death he had
anatomized over 500 different species of animals, some of them
repeatedly, and had made numerous dissections of plants. The
manuscript works by him, appropriated and destroyed by Home, among
which were his eighty-six surgical lectures, all in full, are stated
to have been "literally a cartload"; and many pages of his records
were written by Clift under his directions "at least half a dozen
times over, with corrections and transpositions almost without end."
To the kindness of his disposition, his fondness for animals, his
aversion to operations, his thoughtful and self-sacrificing attention
to his patients, and especially his zeal to help forward struggling
practitioners and others in any want abundantly testify. Pecuniary
means he valued no further than they enabled him to promote his
researches; and to the poor, to non-beneficed clergymen, professional
authors and artists his services were rendered without remuneration.
His yearly income in 1763-1774 was never L1000; it exceeded that sum
in 1778, for several years before his death was L5000, and at the time
of that event had reached above L6000. All his earnings not required
for domestic expenses were, during the last ten years of his life,
devoted to the improvement of his museum; and his property, this
excepted, was found on his decease to be barely sufficient to pay his
debts. By his contemporaries generally Hunter was respected as a
master of the art and science of anatomy, and as a cautious and
trustworthy if not an elegant or very dexterous operator. Few,
however, perceived the drift of his biological researches. Although it
was admitted, even by Jesse Foot,[28] that the idea after which his
unique museum had been formed--namely, that of morphology as the only
true basis of a systematic zoological classification--was entirely his
own, yet his investigations into the structure of the lower orders of
animals were regarded as works of unprofitable curiosity. One surgeon,
of no inconsiderable repute, is said to have ventured the remark that
Hunter's preparations were "just as valuable as so many pig's
pettitoes";[29] and the president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph
Banks, writing in 1796, plainly expressed his disbelief as to the
collection being "an object of importance to the general study of
natural history, or indeed to any branch of science except to that of
medicine." It was "without the solace of sympathy or encouragement of
approbation, without collateral assistance,"[30] and careless of
achieving fame--for he held that "no man ever was a great man who
wanted to be one"--that Hunter laboured to perfect his designs, and
established the science of comparative anatomy, and principles which,
however neglected in his lifetime, became the ground-work of all
medical study and teaching.
In accordance with the directions given by Hunter in his will, his
collection was offered for purchase to the British government. But the
prime minister, Pitt, on being asked to consider the matter,
exclaimed: "What! buy preparations! Why, I have not money enough to
purchase gunpowder." He, however, consented to the bestowal of a
portion of the king's bounty for a couple of years on Mrs Hunter and
her two surviving children. In 1796 Lord Auckland undertook to urge
upon the government the advisability of acquiring the collection, and
on the 13th of June 1799, parliament voted L15,000 for this purpose.
Its custodianship, after refusal by the College of Physicians, was
unanimously accepted by the Corporation of Surgeons on the terms
proposed. These were in brief--that the collection be open four hours
in the forenoon, two days every week, for the inspection and
consultation of the fellows of the College of Physicians, the members
of the Company of Surgeons and persons properly introduced by them, a
catalogue of the preparations and an official to explain it being at
those times always at hand; that a course of not less than twenty-four
lectures[31] on comparative anatomy and other subjects illustrated by
the collection be given every year by some member of the Company; and
that the preparations be kept in good preservation at the expense of
the Corporation, and be subject to the superintendence of a board of
sixteen trustees.[32] The fulfilment of these conditions was rendered
possible by the receipt of fees for examinations and diplomas, under
the charter by which, in 1800, the Corporation was constituted the
Royal College of Surgeons. In 1806 the collection was placed in
temporary quarters in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the sum of L15,000 was
voted by parliament for the erection of a proper and commodious
building for its preservation and extension. This was followed by a
grant of L12,500 in 1807. The collection was removed in 1812 to the
new museum, and opened to visitors in 1813. The greater part of the
present edifice was built in 1835, at an expense to the college of
about L40,000; and the combined Hunterian and collegiate collections,
having been rearranged in what are now termed the western and middle
museums, were in 1836 made accessible to the public. The erection of
the eastern museum in 1852, on premises in Portugal Street, bought in
1847 for L16,000, cost L25,000, of which parliament granted L15,000;
it was opened in 1855.
The scope of Hunter's labours may be defined as the explication of the
various phases of life exhibited in organized structures, both animal
and vegetable, from the simplest to the most highly differentiated. By
him, therefore, comparative anatomy was employed, not in subservience
to the classification of living forms, as by Cuvier, but as a means of
gaining insight into the principle animating and producing these
forms, by virtue of which he perceived that, however different in form
and faculty, they were all allied to himself. In what does life
consist? is a question which in his writings he frequently considers,
and which seems to have been ever present in his mind. Life, he
taught, was a principle independent of structure,[33] most tenaciously
held by the least highly organized beings, but capable of readier
destruction as a whole, as, e.g., by deprivation of heat or by pain,
in young than in old animals. In life he beheld an agency working
under the control of law, and exercising its functions in various
modes and degrees. He perceived it, as Abernethy observes, to be "a
great chemist," a power capable of manufacturing a variety of
substances into one kind of generally distributed nutriment, and of
furnishing from this a still greater variety of dissimilar substances.
Like Harvey, who terms it the _anima vegetiva_, he regarded it as a
principle of self-preservation, which keeps the body from dissolution.
Life is shown, said he, in renovation and action; but, although
facilitated in its working by mechanical causes, it can exist without
action, as in an egg new-laid or undergoing incubation. It is not
simply a regulator of temperature; it is a principle which resists
cold, conferring on the structures which it endows the capacity of
passing some degrees below the freezing-point of ordinary inanimate
matter without suffering congelation. Hunter found, in short, that
there exists in animals a latent heat of life, set free in the process
of death (see _Treatise on the Blood_, p. 80). Thus he observed that
sap if removed from trees froze at 32 deg. F., but within them might
be fluid even at 15 deg.; that a living snail placed in a freezing
mixture acquired first a temperature of 28 deg., and afterwards of 32
deg. ere it froze; and that, whereas a dead egg congealed immediately
at 32 deg., a living egg did so only when its temperature had risen to
that point after a previous fall to 29(1/4) deg. The idea that the
fluid and semifluid as well as the solid constituents of the body
contain the vital principle diffused through them he formed in
1755-1756, when, in making drawings illustrative of the changes that
take place in the incubated egg, he noted specially that neither the
white nor the yolk undergoes putrefaction. The blood he, with Harvey,
considered to possess a vitality of its own, more or less independent
of that of the animal in which it circulates. Life, he held, is
preserved by the compound of the living body and the source of its
solid constituents, the living blood. It is to the susceptibility of
the latter to be converted into living organized tissue that the union
of severed structures by the first intention is due. He even inclined
to the belief that the chyle has life, and he considered that food
becomes "animalized" in digestion. Coagulation of the blood he
compared to the contraction of muscles, and believed to be an
operation of life distinct from chemical coagulation, adducing in
support of his opinion the fact that, in animals killed by lightning,
by violent blows on the stomach, or by the exhaustion of hunting, it
does not take place. "Breathing," said Hunter, "seems to render life
to the blood, and the blood continues it in every part of the
body."[34] Life, he held, could be regarded as a fire, or something
similar, and might for distinction's sake be called "animal fire." Of
this the process of respiration might afford a constant supply, the
fixed life supplied to the body in the food being set free and
rendered active in the lungs, whilst the air carried off that
principle which encloses and retains the animal fire.[35] The living
principle, said Hunter, is coeval with the existence of animal or
vegetable matter itself, and may long exist without sensation. The
principle upon which depends the power of sensation regulates all our
external actions, as the principle of life does our internal, and the
two act mutually on each other in consequence of changes produced in
the brain. Something (the "materia vitae diffusa") similar to the
components of the brain (the "materia vitae coacervata") may be
supposed to be diffused through the body and even contained in the
blood; between these a communication is kept up by the nerves (the
"chordae internunciae").[36] Neither a material nor a chemical theory
of life, however, formed a part of Hunter's creed. "Mere composition
of matter," he remarked, "does not give life; for the dead body has
all the composition it ever had; life is a property we do not
understand; we can only see the necessary leading steps towards
it."[37] As from life only, said he in one of his lectures, we can
gain an idea of death, so from death only we gain an idea of life.
Life, being an agency leading to, but not consisting of, any
modification of matter, "either is something superadded to matter, or
else consists in a peculiar arrangement of certain fine particles of
matter, which being thus disposed acquire the properties of life." As
a bar of iron may gain magnetic virtue by being placed for a time in a
special position, so perhaps the particles of matter arranged and long
continued in a certain posture eventually gain the power of life. "I
enquired of Mr Hunter," writes one of his pupils,[38] "if this did not
make for the Exploded Doctrine of Equivocal Generation: he told me
perhaps it did, and that as to Equivocal Generation all we c^d have
was negative Proofs of its not taking Place. He did not deny that
Equivocal Generation happened; there were neither positive proofs for
nor against its taking place."
To exemplify the differences between organic and inorganic growth,
Hunter made and employed in his lectures a collection of crystallized
specimens of minerals, or, as he termed them, "natural or native
fossils." Of fossils, designated by him "extraneous fossils," because
extraneous respecting the rocks in which they occur, he recognized the
true nature, and he arranged them according to a system agreeing with
that adopted for recent organisms. The study of fossils enabled him to
apply his knowledge of the relations of the phenomena of life to
conditions, as exhibited in times present, to the elucidation of the
history of the earth in geological epochs. He observed the
non-occurrence of fossils in granite, but with his customary
scientific caution and insight could perceive no reason for supposing
it to be the original matter of the globe, prior to vegetable or
animal, or that its formation was different from that of other rocks.
In water he recognized the chief agent in producing terrestrial
changes (cf. _Treatise on the Blood_, p. 15, note); but the popular
notion that the Noachian deluge might account for the marine organisms
discovered on land he pointed out was untenable. From the diversity of
the situations in which many fossils and allied living structures are
found, he was led to infer that at various periods not only repeated
oscillations of the level of the land, lasting thousands of centuries,
but also great climatic variations, perhaps due to a change in the
ecliptic, had taken place in geological times. Hunter considered that
very few fossils of those that resemble recent forms are identical
with them. He conceived that the latter might be varieties, but that
if they are really different species, then "we must suppose that a new
creation must have taken place." It would appear, therefore, that the
origin of species in variation had not struck him as possible. That he
believed varieties to have resulted from the influence of changes in
the conditions of life in times past is shown by a somewhat obscure
passage in his "Introduction to Natural History" (_Essays and
Observations_, i. 4), in which he remarks, "But, I think, we have
reason to suppose that there was a period of time in which every
species of natural production was the same, there being then no
variety in any species," and adds that "civilization has made
varieties in many species, which are the domesticated." Modern
discoveries and doctrines as to the succession of life in time are
again foreshadowed by him in the observation in his introduction to
the description of drawings relative in incubation (quoted in Pref. to
_Cat. of Phys. Ser._ i. p. iv., 1833) that: "If we were capable of
following the progress of increase of the number of the parts of the
most perfect animal, as they first formed in succession, from the very
first, to its state of full perfection, we should probably be able to
compare it with some one of the incomplete animals themselves, of
every order of animals in the creation, being at no stage different
from some of those inferior orders; or, in other words, if we were to
take a series of animals from the more imperfect to the perfect, we
should probably find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage
of the most perfect."
In pathological phenomena Hunter discerned the results of the
perturbation of those laws of life by which the healthy organism
subsists. With him pathology was a science of vital dynamics. He
afforded principles bearing not on single complaints only, but on the
effects of injury and disease in general. To attempt to set forth what
in Hunter's teaching was new to pathology and systematic surgery, or
was rendered so by his mode of treatment, would be well-nigh to
present an epitome of all that he wrote on those subjects. "When we
make a discovery in pathology," says Adams, writing in 1818, "we only
learn what we have overlooked in his writings or forgotten in his
lectures." Surgery, which only in 1745 had formally ceased to be
associated with "the art and mystery of barbers," he raised to the
rank of a scientific profession. His doctrines were, necessarily, not
those of his age: while lesser minds around him were still dim with
the mists of the ignorance and dogmatism of times past, his lofty
intellect was illumined by the dawn of a distant day.
AUTHORITIES.--See, besides the above quoted publications, _An Appeal
to the present Parliament ... on the subject of the late J. Hunter's
Museum_ (1795); Sir C. Bell, _A Lecture ... being a Commentary on Mr
J. Hunter s preparations of the Diseases of the Urethra_ (1830); The
President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, _Address to the
Committee for the Erection of a Statue of Hunter_ (Lond., March 29,
1859); Sir R. Owen, "Sketch of Hunter's Scientific Character and
Works," in Tom Taylor's _Leicester Square_ (1874), also in Hunter's
Works, ed. by Palmer, vol. iv. (1837), and in _Essays and
Observations_; the invaluable catalogues of the Hunterian Collection
issued by the Royal College of Surgeons; and numerous Hunterian
Orations. In the _Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales_, by John
White, is a paper containing directions for preserving animals,
printed separately in 1809, besides six zoological descriptions by
Hunter; and in the _Natural History of Aleppo_, by A. Russell, are
remarks of Hunter's on the anatomy of the jerboa and the camel's
stomach. Notes of his lectures on surgery, edited by J. W. K.
Parkinson, appeared in 1833 under the title of _Hunterian
Reminiscences_. Hunter's _Observations and Reflections on Geology_,
intended to serve as an introduction to the catalogue of his
collection of extraneous fossils, was published in 1859, and his
_Memoranda on Vegetation_ in 1860. (F. H. B.)