APPENDIX. 97 



fish ? The society, he knew, wanted not his testimony to prove 

 that birds and fish had them. What, then, could he mean by 

 it, but to claim the discovery ? 



As there could be no doubt that Professor Monro meant 

 this letter as a claim to these discoveries, neither had I any 

 doubt but I should, for the reasons above mentioned, prove that 

 he had no right to them. In order therefore to prevent the 

 prejudices that might arise against my papers, from his being 

 believed to have anticipated me in these discoveries, I wrote a 

 letter to one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, in which 

 I first showed that I had seen the lacteals of the turtle about 

 a year before Dr. Monro, and then, when I came to speak of 

 those vessels in birds and fish against the probability of Dr. 

 Monro's having anticipated me in these discoveries, I made use 

 of the following arguments : 



1st. His not having, by his own confession, 1 injected them, 

 which he certainly would have done in order to complete the 

 discovery. To which I observed he had the strongest motive, 

 both from his knowing the importance of the subject, and 

 from his having unfortunately declared, in the 57th page of 

 his 'Anatomical and Physiological Observations/ printed at 

 Edinburgh, 1758, "that, after a considerable number of experi- 

 ments which he had made, he was convinced that neither birds, 

 fishes, nor oviparous animals in general, had either lacteals or 

 lymphatic vessels." After which declaration I conceived it im- 

 probable he should patiently wait eight years without injecting 

 them, especially as I had found it an easy matter to inject 

 them, when once they were discovered ; and, I added, the pro- 

 bability was that if he had seen those vessels, he would have 

 hastened to inject them, and to complete the discovery, were it 

 only to prevent another person's doing it, and thereby acquiring 

 the reputation of having done what he himself had in vain at- 

 tempted by such a considerable number of experiments as were 

 sufficient to convince him that such vessels existed not in those 

 animals. 



2dly. I said his claim to the discovery of those vessels, by 

 affirming he had seen them eight years ago, was contradicted 

 by public declararions made after that time ; for he had since 

 acknowledged in his lectures, that he had sought for them in 



1 In his claim ; see above, p. 96. 



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