350 JOHN BARNARD SWETT JACKSON. 



nature, which as far as they professed to go would be more likely to 

 gain than lose by comparison with the famous works of an earlier day, 

 the Sepulcretum of Bonetus, the great treatise De Sedibus et Causis 

 Morborum, or the Glinique Medicate of Andral. 



" As far as they professed to go." There is no propriety in com- 

 paring pathological anatomy as Dr. Jackson studied it with the patho- 

 logical histology of a later epoch. He was not a microscropist. The 

 telescope of the infinitesimal universe had not perfected its eyesight 

 until long after he had become an adept in studying the larger aspects 

 of diseased structure. What he knew he knew thoroughly, but he 

 never pretended to have the slightest knowledge beyond what his 

 honest naked eyes could teach him. He was not ashamed of their 

 nakedness : in fact, it was next to impossible to coax him to look 

 through a microscope. He would turn away with, " I know nothing 

 about it," in a tone that implied he did not want to have any thing to 

 do with it. But these same honest eyes of his were very keen ones, 

 and saw things with about as little of chromatic or other aberration as 

 any that have opened to our daylight. His look penetrated like an 

 exploring needle, and many a tympanitic fancy of careless observers 

 has collapsed under its searching scrutiny. 



This is not the place to do more than allude to the record he has 

 left of himself in medical literature. For half a century he has been 

 at work among us ; and the inventory of his finished labors, were it 

 made out in full, would astonish many of those who have seen him 

 only when he was busied with some of those smaller tasks in which 

 he was punctilious to an extent that now and then provoked a good- 

 natured smile. He had the true genius of a curator, and was never 

 tired of working at his specimens, to get them into the best condition 

 and show them off to the best advantage. 



As a lecturer, Dr. Jackson was exact rather than fluent or copious 

 in expression, but his knowledge was so genuine and so thoroughly 

 his own that it commanded the closest attention and the greatest 

 respect. For the last few years he has not lectured, but confined him- 

 self to his duties as curator. Never was there a more enthusiastic 

 devotee to that particular kind of work. He was a picture of cheerful 

 content in the midst of the fragmentary specimens of Nature's handi- 

 work by which he was wont to be surrounded. No student in the 

 first flush of his boyish enthusiasm was ever more full of excitement, 

 more radiant with delight, than this man whom the record called old, 

 but whom his unquenchable vitality preserved ever youthful and 

 ever happy in illustrating some fact by a new preparation, or in 



