vin ANIMAL MORPHOLOGY-- 101 



fifty years, William Clift, had occupied himself in the interval 

 between Hunter's death and the removal of the manuscripts to 

 Sir Everard Home's house, in making copious extracts from 

 these precious documents. The publication of these extracts, 

 nearly seventy years after their author had passed away, 

 however meritorious a labour on the part of their editor, can 

 unfortunately do little to regain for Hunter that place among 

 the leaders of science which his own untimely death, and the 

 negligence, or worse, of his executor had deprived him. 

 Highly original and valuable as are the observations contained 

 in these volumes, they have by this time been nearly all 

 anticipated by others. A crowd of workers in the same field, 

 pressing in from all directions, have covered the ground which 

 ought to have been occupied by the figure of Hunter, and from 

 which no tardy .recognition of his merits can ever dispossess 

 them. We shall still continue to look to Cuvier and to Meckel 

 as the main sources of our modern knowledge of comparative 

 anatomy, and not to Hunter. Let us, though, never forget 

 that our illustrious countryman had, before their time, collected 

 materials for a work which needed but the finishing touches to 

 have made it one of the greatest, most durable, and valuable 

 contributions ever made by any one man to the advancement 

 of the science of comparative anatomy. 



The present course of lectures, as just said, are intimately 

 associated with the museum ; their annual delivery was one 

 of the conditions on which the care of the Hunterian collection 

 was entrusted by the Government to our College, and it was 

 expressly stipulated that they should be " illustrated by the 

 preparations." I am bound, therefore, in my choice of subjects 

 to consider what the museum teaches, and what it does not 

 teach. The museum teaches one subject, and, primarily, only 

 one subject namely, the variations in the form and relations 

 of the different parts or organs of which the bodies of various 

 animals are composed. In brief, it teaches Animal Morphology, 

 which is nearly synonymous with Comparative Anatomy. 



jSTow, morphology, I need hardly say, is not physiology, 

 though it may be one of the foundations on which that 

 complex science is based. But, contrary as it may seem to 



