THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM AT THE

COLLEGE OF SURGEONS.

How many among the thousands who have viewed with artistic delight Sharp's engraving of Sir Joshua's picture of John Hunter have ever taken the trouble to inquire further respecting the glories of the great original? Yet Hunter was, without the slightest doubt, one of the most prominent representative men of the last century-a man whose advent the great Bacon must have foreseen, and whose traces will be discernible to physiologists of the latest posterity. A poor lad, without friends-for those valuable ones he had, he unhappily became estranged from -wends his way from an obscure town in the north, sets resolutely to work, and bone by bone, tissue by tissue, specimen by specimen, builds up a history of animated creation from the shapeless zoophite to imperial man himself. Before the time of Hunter a few detached groups of facts were all that we possessed of the great chain of terrestrial life. By painful every-day toil, by incessant thought, link by link, he connected these groups together, supplied entire lengths that were deficient, and made manifest the spirit of unity that pervaded the whole. He touched the full diapason of organised life, and left to posterity in his great museum the harmonious song he had elicited from the most hidden recesses of nature. He did all this, and

like many others in the ranks of pure philosophy, he died rich only in the gifts he had conferred upon mankind. When the exigencies of his widow demanded that his museum should be offered to the Government-which at that time meant William Pitt-the reply of the Minister was, characteristic of the warlike atmosphere in which he lived, "What, give £20,000 for bottles? We want the money to buy gunpowder!" The value of the truths enshrined in those bottles, however, would prevail, and after seven years' clamouring at the doors of Ministers, Science at length got a hearing in the House of Commons, and Parliament agreed to purchase the Hunterian Collection for the sum of £15,000, and it was then transferred to the custody of the Corporation of Surgeons, which became incorporated in the year 1800 as the Royal College of Surgeons. Other grants of money were afterwards made towards the collection by Government, and the college itself has since built the magnificent museum in which is enshrined what may truly be considered the apothesis of Hunter. Year by year this magnificent collection has been added to by purchase, and the additions made by the curator of the college have gone on to such an extent, that the preparations, physiological and pathological, the exclusive work of Hunter, which only numbered at his death 10,536, now reach to upwards of 30,000.

If the visitor happens to know an M.R.C.S., he readily obtains a passport to its lofty apartments, and as readily falls into a certain attitude of wonder at beholding such an infinity of natural objects in, to him, an unnatural dress. The floors groaning with the weight of gigantic skeletons of extinct animals; the side cases filled with the

grand procession of organised life, from the vegetable to the highest order of animal life; the upper galleries shining with a vast army of bottles, the depositories of Nature's more subtile secrets; the shelves full of monstrosities and malformations, and the glass cases rich in physical curiosities illustrative of the accidents to which life is subjected. Here a series of tadpoles, from the time the creature leaves the ovum to that period of adolescence when, contrary to the human example, it casts its tail; there a couple of gigantic American elk horns, fast locked in conflict, the doe for which the animals had been fighting was found dead beside the entangled belligerents; a little further on the skeleton of poor Chunee-the hapless elephant who suffered death at Exeter Change for the crime of having the toothache-his skull riddled with balls, showing that the file of soldiers who did the murder were not possessed of the skill of the great hunter, Gordon Cumming, who dropped his elephant of a hundred summers with one ball judiciously planted. Turn which way he will, where in fact all is order, he sees nothing but confusion. Under these circumstances we cannot do better than take the visitor by the hand, and let his attention fall naturally upon the most prominent objects.

There is evidently a natural determination of giants towards the museum. The most striking object the eye meets on entering the first large room is the skeleton of the Irish giant, O'Bryan. His fate was a memorable example of how vain is the struggle men of such extravagant development wage against the anatomist. Poor O'Bryan, who drank himself to death, evidently had a presentiment of the manner in which his body would be

disposed of; and he tried to avert it by directing that his body should be sunk in the deep, and in order to provide for this disposition of it, two men were provided to watch it until the time for the burial came. But Hunter could

not bring himself to let slip such an opportunity to acquire such a "specimen," and he attempted to bribe the wretches by offering them a hundred pounds for it. His eagerness was too apparent, however, and these trustworthy individuals. managed to raise the price to £800! The prize obtained, Hunter sent it home in his own carriage, and fearing lest it should be claimed, immediately dismembered, and boiled it. The writer of the description in the catalogue apologetically refers to the consequent brown appearance of the skeleton, in the same spirit as a clear-starcher would of the unsatisfactory "get up" of a piece of fine linen. It does not appear to make much difference to O'Bryan, however, who is posed in an easy attitude, with one arm hanging carelessly by his side, and the other held elegantly aloft, towering by the head and shoulders over another "rough sketch of man," which stands upon an opposite pedestal. In the glass cases which fill the left-hand corner of the upper end of the room, other giants with a commendable modesty keep in the back ground. Freeman, the American pugilist, as far as the whiteness of his bones is concerned, cannot complain of his "getting up; and in the other corner a gigantic tinker forms a becoming pendant. This man when in the flesh used to pass by the college, and do odd jobs, and in return he is conveniently housed in this comfortable glass case. At the bottom of the glass case we see the outstretched hands of other giants marked—the English giant, Bradley; the French giant,

Mons. Lewis, seven feet four inches; the Irish giant, Patrick Cotter, eight feet seven inches. They seem to hold up their hands in testimony of their stature ere they finally subside to the level of mother earth. But what is there particular about that rather short and powerful skeleton between the two larger ones? The attendant takes out his card, which lies against the wall in the shape of a coffin-plate thus inscribed :

The card forgets to give his last address, doubtless from motives of delicacy. Tyburn was not such a fashionable neighbourhood then as it has since become. There is nothing about the present appearance of the great thiefcatcher which at all reminds one of his bad pre-eminence in life. In all probability, many of the skeletons about him were those of thieves and murderers; for of old the