4 Biographical Memoir of the late Dr Henry. 



ing ; — in snbstance, deriving general pathological conclusions, 

 from the accumulated and methodized results of an experience 

 no less ample than sagaciously directed and interpreted. As a 

 hospital physician, Dr Ferriar seems to have possessed, in an 

 eminent degree, the faculty of at once eliciting truth from the 

 obtuseness or reluctance of the suffering poor, by his abrupt 

 and pointed interrogatories, and by his impatience of all irrele- 

 vant matter. He was especially distinguished by strength and 

 rectitude of understanding, by manners perhaps somewhat un- 

 bending and severe, by a high sense of honour, and by a fear- 

 less and dignified moral bearing. To his pupil, his manner 

 was always friendly and encouraging ; — and out of this early 

 intercourse issued the sources of mutual esteem and permanent 

 friendship, which were strongly evinced by his confiding, during 

 illness, his medical duties to Dr Henry, and also by his making 

 choice of him as his own attendant in the successive seizures 

 wln'ch preceded his deatli. 



After having been thus initiated in those pursuits to which 

 his after life was to be mainly dedicated, Dr Hem-y was re- 

 moved in the winter of 1795-6 to the University of Edinburgh, 

 at that time in its highest repute as a school of medicine and of 

 the natural sciences. The chair of chemistry was still occu- 

 pied by the venerable Dr Black, whose discovery of the facts 

 that establish the existence of heat in a latent form, and whose 

 successful discrimination between the caustic earths and their 

 carbonates, had raised him to the highest rank among chemical 

 philosophers. Dr Henry was an eager hearer of the beautiful 

 prelections in which Dr Black, with calm and simple dignity, 

 unfolded, in exact and perspicuous order, the truths of a sci- 

 ence, which may almost be said to have been first called into 

 existence by himself and his contemporaries. Dr Henry's early 

 kindled love for science was strengthened by lessons so impres- 

 sively taught, in which, reverence for the teacher was interwo- 

 ven with intense delight in the subject matter of his instruc- 

 tions, and, especially, with a glowing admiration of that suc- 

 cessful inductive process which had guided to the discovery of 

 latent caloric. Dr Henry was no less fortunate in his other in- 

 structors, both in general and professional knowledge. The 

 important chair of Practical Medicine was then filled by Dr 



