vli 



ing the scientific reputation of his great predecessor, John Hunter, 

 by arranging and revising for publication a large collection of 

 precious manuscripts containing records of dissections of animals 

 and observations and reflections upon numerous subjects connected 

 with anatomy, physiology, and natural history in general. These 

 were published in 1861, in two closely printed octavo volumes, 

 entitled 'Essays and Observations in Natural History, Anatomy, 

 Physiology, Psychology, and Geology, by John Hunter, being his 

 Posthumous Papers on those subjects.' The original manuscripts 

 had been destroyed by Sir Everard Home, in 1823, but fortunately 

 not before "William Clift had taken copies of the greater part of 

 them, and it was from these copies that the work was compiled. Its 

 publication shows that Hunter, while occupied with a large and 

 anxious practice in itself labour enough for an ordinary man 

 while cultivating with a passionate energy the sciences of physiology 

 and pathology, while collecting and arranging a museum such as 

 has never been formed before or since by a single individual, had also 

 carefully recorded a series of dissections of different species of 

 animals which, as his editor justly says, "if published seriatim, 

 would not only have vied with the labours of Daubenton, as recorded 

 in the ' Histoire Naturelle,' of Buffon, or with the ' Comparative 

 Dissections ' of Vicq d'Azyr, which are inserted in the early volumes 

 of the 'Encyclopedic Methodiqne' and the 'Memoires de 1'Aca- 

 de"nue Royale de France,' but would have exceeded them both 

 together." 



In 1866 were published the first and second volumes, and in 1868 

 the third volume, of Owen's own great book on the Anatomy and 

 Physiology of the Vertebrates. 



This is the most encyclopaedic work on the subject accomplished 

 by any one individual since Cuvier's ' Le9ons d'Anatomie Comparee,' 

 and contains an immense mass of information mainly based upon 

 original observations and dissections. It is in fact a collection of 

 nearly all his previous memoirs arranged in systematic order, 

 generally in the very words in which they were originally written, 

 and unfortunately sometimes without the revision which advances 

 made in the subject by the labours of others would have rendered 

 desirable. Very little of the classification adopted in this work, 

 either the primary division of the Vertebrates into Hsematocrya and 

 Hsematotherma, or the divisions into classes and sub-classes, has been 

 accepted by other zoologists. The division of the Mammalia into 

 four sub-classes of equivalent value, upheld by Owen, not only in this 

 work, but in various other publications issued about the same time 

 (Rede Lecture, &c.), founded upon cerebral characteristics, was 

 especially open to criticism. Though the separation of the Mono- 

 tremes and Marsupials from, all the others as a distinct group 



