130 EXCELLENT TEACHING. 



pliic teachings of the professor, and maintained that 

 his published writings afforded no clue to his oral 

 teaching, and the beneficent operations of his own 

 mind over those of his audience. His lectures were 

 like finished work from a master's hand ; it was an in- 

 tellectual treat to see the building up from day to day 

 of a beautiful scientific structure upon an anatomical 

 basis. His teaching, like true art, embellished and 

 adorned his work ; and of the youths who crowded in 

 hundreds to his anatomical fane, not a fractional part 

 of their numbers found fault with his ministrations ; 

 whilst the large majority seem to have been inspired 

 by the constancy of purpose and love of science that 

 possessed the Goodsir breast. 



The dissecting-table was Goodsir's place ; there he 

 impersonated the diligent inquirer and true learner. 

 After a full demonstration of a region, he kept turning 

 over the parts of the anatomy as if the very handling 

 of them would respond to his interrogations of nature. 

 His head and hands always worked together. When 

 his mind was absorbed in close investigation, nothing 

 disturbed him — like Laennec at the bedside of a 

 patient diagnosing the delicate bruit or rdle, despite 

 the crowds of students and the noise of sabots along 

 the brick floors of the hospital-wards. No one knew 

 human myology better than Goodsir; yet in 1841 

 he solicited the writer to get him an adult male for the 

 purpose of making a complete dissection of the muscles, 

 so as to study the functions and relations of these to 

 surgery and comparative anatomy. As lately as the 



