78 NATURAL HISTORY. 



which his marriage necessarily entailed upon him were 

 paid for by his well-known treatise entitled ' The Natural 

 History of the Teeth,' the first volume of which he had 

 published some two months previously. Mrs Hunter, 

 according to Ottley, was ' an agreeable, clever, and hand- 

 some woman, a little of a bas-bleu, and rather fond of 

 gay society, a taste which occasionally interfered with her 

 husband's more philosophic pursuits.' 



In spite of his now having taken upon himself the 

 cares of domestic life, and also of his rapidly increasing 

 professional duties, Hunter continued to apply himself 

 with the utmost ardour to the study of comparative 

 anatomy and physiology. Much of his leisure was spent 

 at EarPs Court, where he carried out numerous experi- 

 ments on digestion, on the growth and destruction of bone, 

 on the metamorphosis of the silkworm, and on many 

 other similar subjects. The following is a short list of 

 some of the more important subjects of a physiological 

 or zoological nature upon which he published papers, 

 with the dates of publication. 



In 1772, he published a paper in the 'Philosophical 

 Transactions ' on the power which the gastric juice has, 

 under certain circumstances, of 'digesting' or dissolving 

 the walls of the stomach itself after death. This phe- 

 nomenon, now well known, was new in Hunter's time, 

 and has important bearings upon the chemical theory of 

 digestion. 



In 1773, he carried out a dissection of the electric 

 ray or torpedo, and published an account of his observa- 

 tions in the ' Philosophical Transactions.' 



In the following year, in the same publication, he 



