I 



July 26, 1900] 



NA TURE 



295 



old civic Corporation of Surgeons. Indeed, it died, 

 through inadvertence, under his rule. He belonged to 

 an office-holding race. His father, Sir Caesar Hawkins, 

 the first baronet, and his uncle, Quennell Hawkins, both 

 St. George's men, where office was bought for large sums 

 of money paid to seniors, had been Serjeant Surgeons to 

 George II., and as such were liable to accompany him 

 on his campaigns. Whether they did so is doubtful ; 

 it was Ranby who attended the gallant little king 

 at Dettingen. Charles Hawkins enjoyed the honours of 

 the same office, which take us back in thought to 

 Homer's Machaon and Podalirius,[and to the Sanskrit 

 word " Shalya," " an arrow-head," or " surgery." But 

 beyond this we know very little of Charles Hawkins. 

 There are others like unto him whom we need not 

 specify. The " Dictionary of National Biography " 

 knows them not. Their peculiarity was silence, " the 

 fool's best friend." Conjointly they published nothing ; 

 an aversion to intellectual exertion seems to have dis- 

 tinguished them. But we can imagine them at least as 

 strict upholders of dignified routine, as courtiers, as men 

 of the world. The delightful eighteenth century died 

 very hard in England — in Latin countries it is not dead 

 yet— and these old gentlemen, with their powdered hair 

 and voluminous cambric cravats, seemed to carry on the 

 tradition of an ample age, where a fine face, a white 

 hand, and a capacity for classical quotation fitted an 

 average great man for any sort of position from the Papal 

 chair to the presidency of the English College of 

 Surgeons. Others there were, however, even in the early 

 days of the College history, who struck a different note. 

 Such were the terrible Abernethy, a man driven into 

 savagery of manner by his innate sense of justice, which 

 abhorred the quacks of his day and generation and their 

 self-indulgent victims, suffering from avoidable ills, 

 chiefly due to the effects of over-feeding and the '•'• alcoo- 

 lisme des gens de bon ion." Such also the variable 

 Lawrence, an early Darwinian, a passionate reformer and 

 reform journalist, in association with the famous VVakley, 

 an eloquent orator, and, in the end, a conservative 

 College Councillor of the strictest. 



In the College Library and Council Room during 

 the centenary celebrations, an exhibition is being held 

 of portraits, busts, relics and manuscripts illustrative of 

 the history of the College, and this in itself bears witness 

 to the changes which a hundred years can bring forth. 

 Among the exhibits never, we believe, shown before, but 

 now sanctioned by the lapse of long years, are papers of 

 importance from the Owen collection. Here, for instance, 

 is the Curator Cliff's determined evidence against Sir 

 Everard Home, Bart., who plagiarised from Hunter's 

 papers and then destroyed them. In one exhibited letter 

 Cliff quotes Sir Everard's words, "all gone, every Jack of 

 them," in reference to Hunter's descriptions of cases and 

 specimens. This is not the place to discuss the Home — 

 Hunter controversy, which has long ago been given over 

 by the experts, but we may be allowed a postscript. The 

 question between Hunter and Home should be judged 

 from the point of view of 1820. Home was an old- 

 fashioned Scotsman of a proud and ancient stock. 

 Hunter came of a race of " bonnet-lairds." Home looked 

 indulgently down on his brother-in-law. Hunter. These 

 family sentiments are almost incomprehensible to an 

 Englishman, but they rage even in the Scotland of 

 to-day. Home thought he might fairly make use of his 

 humbler connection's notes. He was no academic 

 — had no scholarly regard for literary meum and 

 tuum. How few have even to-day .-* Hunter's notes, 

 on the other hand, to judge by the remaining 

 specimens of them, were extraordinarily rough and often 

 illiterate, though at all times they betray the great and 

 ardent mind fretting and hurrying under inadequate 

 powers of expression. William Clift also, John Hunter's 

 amanuensis and subsequent defender, has been described 



NO. 1604, VOL. 62] 



by one who knew him well as a typical Cornishman, ex- 

 tremely garrulous, prone to repeat himself. There is in 

 the College Library a " solander," alias box, full to the 

 brim almost of Cliff's repeated indictments against Home. 

 The thing suggests '■'■ id^efixe^^ 



Still, though Home acted according to the lights of 

 his day and his order, he committed a crime of magni- 

 tude, and owing thereto the history of the great 

 Hunterian Museum since i8cx3 has been necessarily one 

 of re-construction. Clift began re-writing the Catalogue 

 as it were from memory. He had worked so long with 

 the great John Hunter that he knew how the master 

 would have again spoken of numbers of specimens of 

 which Home had burnt the descriptions. Richard Owen, 

 Cliff's son-in-law, was to Clift very much what Clift had 

 been to Hunter. The young man worked ardently under 

 his directions, sometimes aided by Benjamin Brodie, in 

 his youth a zealous comparative anatomist. In one of 

 his Museum Reports Richard Owen yearns for the days 

 when Clift, and he, and a very few others, including 

 Everard Home, worked incessantly in the Museum- 

 room, undisturbed by the visits of students and sight- 

 seers. 



The public were indeed discouraged from visiting 

 Hunter's collections, not in any gross spirit of obscur- 

 antism, but half-unconsciously, half-hieratically, much as 

 a modern undergraduate reading for a Pass degree is 

 kept at arm's length by the learned Don who is the Col- 

 lege librarian. In 1833 Earle, lecturing on the urinary 

 apparatus, gave vent to one of those petulant outbursts 

 which are more illuminating than pages of studied prose. 

 The passage, now often quoted, appears in the Lancet of 

 the period, and is a bitter satire on the uncatalogued and 

 dusty condition of the then Museum. Earle, it seems, 

 had searched in vain for hours for pathological specimens 

 with which to illustrate his remarks. The whole amusing 

 tirade, if we remember rightly, was discreetly suppressed 

 by him in his republished lecture. 



At the present moment the great Museum— and the 

 Library, too, for that matter — can be read like a book. 

 One of the most notable publications of the centenary is 

 the first portion of the " Physiological Catalogue," which, 

 with its finely executed plates, will remain an enduring 

 monument to the graphic skill and scientific acquirements 

 of the Conservator and his staff. 



The Museum, the Library, and the College owe their 

 being, as it were, to John Hunter ; but their emergence 

 from the coma of the first three decades of the century is 

 in great measure due to Sir Richard Owen. It is notable 

 that the moment he begins to lecture in 1835, VVardrop's 

 grumbling commentary in the Lancet undergoes a change. 

 It seems at first as though the serious young Conservator 

 was not understood. What did he aim at ? why should 

 he do so well where others had wrought so indolently ? 

 Then gradually the Lancet critics change their tone, and 

 bless where before they had cursed. 



A lecture by Owen became in time one of the great 

 social and intellectual functions of the London world. 

 Science was not then so specialised as it is to-day, nor 

 perhaps so divorced from the interests of the literary. 

 Bishops presided over the British Association ; hereditary 

 peers over the Royal Society ; the Prince Consort took 

 an interest in microscopy ; the poets had not yet become 

 decadent or aesthetic ; the Tractarian movement had not 

 yet replunged the world of women in the ages of faith. 

 The public mind, indeed, would seem to have been more 

 liberal than now. To this mind — alert, interested, deeply 

 curious — Owen addressed himself with zeal. It is singular 

 to note, at this distance of time, that his lecture would 

 end with a debate, in which the Dean of St, Paul's would 

 heckle the professor. 



The College Lectures became still more important 

 when Huxley succeeded to the chair Owen had once 

 occupied. Owen retired in 1855, after delivering a course 



