ZOOLOGICAL REMARKS. 21 



occupation of the intellectual world, such studies seem 

 uncalled for as barren of future profitable results. That 

 such a feeling prevails with most professional students 

 using the term professional in its widest acceptation I am 

 well aware ; indeed, as regards the students of one of these 

 learned professions, none can know better, if so well, as I 

 do. The Medical Director of the anatomical studies of 

 many thousands of medical students, I have ever found 

 them adverse to Science, strictly so called ; especially to 

 that branch of Zoological Science termed Natural History. 

 They desire to be practical. Zoology is not a practical 

 art : in this view, therefore, it leads to nothing. 



"John Hunter had lived and laboured ; his vast ideas, 

 his brilliant discoveries, his views, which seem more like 

 inspirations than the natural result of an industry unsur- 

 passed, lay buried in the hall of a corporate body with 

 whom, as a surgeon, he was accidentally associated ; but 

 he had laboured in vain. His views he placed before the 

 world in the form of a museum, to which none of the 

 labours of men's hands can be compared unless it be, and 

 these no doubt excel, the handiwork of those who carved 

 the Medicean Venus and the Belvidere Apollo. Yet he 

 had laboured in vain, for never, I believe, at any period of 

 its history, was Zoology in a lower condition in Britain 

 than that in which I found it when, returning from France 

 in the summer of 1825, I submitted to a small but select 

 class an outline of those great views which France and 

 Germany had taught me, and which I have continued to 

 meditate and reflect on to the present day. Since that 

 period the educational institutions of the country have 

 become somewhat multiplied, perhaps improved. The 

 pressure of continental opinion has told on Britain, and ere 

 long it is by no means improbable the sciences of simple 



