1829. ] Affairs in General. 185 
officers of the United Service, too, have of late years, much to their 
honour, shewn that they can’ manage the pen with effect ; and it cer- 
tainly becomes a matter of importance with them that they should not 
suffer the record of their exertions to be mutilated by the hands of indi- 
viduals who, from their book-shelves, venture to fight battles and 
decide upon reputations. Let our military and naval officers once take 
this method of doing justice to themselves, and we shall see am end of the 
whole generation of pen and ink tacticians—those Czsars and Turennes 
of the closet and the circulating-library—amilitary historians, who have 
formed their notion of battles from a volunteer field-day, and who imagine 
a campaign to be something very like a cricket-match or a village 
scuffle. 
The murder-trade of Burke and his accomplices is not among the 
subjects that we would willingly approach even with an observation. 
But it stands among the prominent features of the day ; and it is per- 
haps fortunate, for the interests of humanity, that this hideous trade has 
forced itself upon the public eye. 
- There can be no doubt of the value of occasional dissections to the 
operator, in some of the nicer cases of surgery ; but there can be as 
little doubt that this use of the dead has degenerated into an abuse— 
that private lecturers have laboured to attract pupils, by the frequency 
of those mutilations of the dead—and that the pupils have been indulged 
in the grossest and most unnecessary violations of the respect that human 
nature itself suggests as due to the remains of man. - 
As to the wretched villains by whom the grave is habitually robbed 
for this purpose, they are described, by those who know them best, to 
be capable of every crime ; and the occupation, which thus tempts and 
hardens man to villainy, is so far obnoxious to moral abhorrence and public 
justice. But, what answer can be made by the surgeons, and other 
professional persons who have trafficked with Burke, is beyond our com- 
petence to conceive. We cannot understand how men of science could 
have believed that the bodies which he brought to them, fresh from 
murder, had ever been in the grave. The appearances are so distinct to 
_ the common eye, that nothing but the most singular blindness could have 
concealed the truth from the anatomists. In one instance, a body was 
said to have been sold with their hair in papillotes. The conclusion must 
have been irresistible ; yet it was undrawn. How are we to account for 
this? We repeat, that the whole transaction must undergo the strictest 
inquiry—that no Scottish favouritism must be suffered to screen the 
abomination, to whatever quarter it may be traced—and that Mr. Peel 
is bound, by as sacred a duty as he ever took upon himself, to see justice 
done to the character of England, of science, and the feelings of human 
nature. 
But how are the anatomical halls to be supplied? In the first place, 
undoubtedly, the necessity for this repulsive supply is greatly exag- 
gerated. In all the earlier stages of anatomy, models are decidedly the 
best mode of giving a knowledge of the human frame. They have been 
already brought to an extraordinary degree of accuracy ; and the leisure 
which they allow for study is so infinitely superior to the hurried and, 
at the best, sickening examination of the actual subject, that a student 
f the model will know as much of the human construction, peculiarly 
M.M. New Series.—Vou. VII. No. 38. 2B 
