172 MEMOIR OF DR WRIGHT. 



the whole of which he has been taught to esteem and 

 to venerate : The great disparity of age between the 

 parties made these narrow opportunities even less 

 available than otherwise they might have been, to 

 the delineation of a faithful and highly finished 

 portraiture : Yet he cannot acquit himself of a task, 

 in which, during the few leisure hours which he has 

 been enabled to devote to it, he has found a fund at 

 once of useful information, and a subject of satisfac- 

 tory reflection, without attempting an estimate of the 

 result, however summary and imperfect. 



As a physician, Dr Wright was chiefly remark- 

 able for his total immunity from the prejudices of sys- 

 tem. He never involved himself in the trammels of 

 any particular school. His mind was at all times ac- 

 cessible to truth ; and he had the courage to declare 

 his conviction, although, in doing so, he should stand 

 alone. His opinions, at the same time, were never ta- 

 ken up in haste, to be, perhaps, as hastily rejected. He 

 was a close observer of nature, prying with curious eye 

 into her most secret recesses, and questioning her ora- 

 cles with unwearied importunity *. Neither did he 



* A singular fact is stated by Dr Wright, in one of the vo- 

 lumes of his Herbary. When suffered to go at large in the thickets 

 of a West India plantation, the hog digs up the roots of the bitter 

 cassada, and, eating them covered with mould, thrives and fattens 

 rapidly in places where the plant is plentiful. But when the same 

 root is washed, or otherwise freed of earthy matter, and given to 

 the hog, it operates as an active and deadly poison. Another plant 

 of the same genus, the common cassada, is regularly used by the 

 Negroes of Jamaica as an article of food; and when at any time the 

 bitter cassada had been eaten by mistake, Dr Wright, adopting 



