xxn RICHARD OWEN 371 



These were adorned in every case with a profusion of admir- 

 able illustrations, drawn as often as possible of the full size of 

 nature. His contributions to the publications of the Palaeonto- 

 graphical Society, mainly upon the extinct Keptiles of the 

 British Isles, fill more than a thousand pages, and are 

 illustrated by nearly three hundred plates. 



He now also found leisure to perform the pious duty of 

 vindicating the scientific reputation of his great predecessor, 

 John Hunter, by arranging and revising for publication a 

 large collection of precious manuscripts containing records of 

 dissections of animals and observations and reflections upon 

 numerous subjects connected with anatomy, physiology, and 

 natural history in general. These were published in 1861, 

 in two closely -printed octavo volumes, entitled Essays and 

 Observations in Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, Psycho- 

 logy, and Geology, by John Hunter, being his Posthumous 

 Papers on those subjects. The original manuscripts had been 

 destroyed by Sir Everard Home in 1823, but fortunately 

 not before "William Clift had taken copies of the greater part 

 of them, and it was from these copies that the work was 

 compiled. Its publication shows that Hunter, while occupied 

 with a large and anxious practice in itself labour enough for 

 an ordinary man while cultivating with a passionate energy 

 the sciences of physiology and pathology, while collecting and 

 arranging a museum such as has never been formed before or 

 since by a single individual, had also carefully recorded a series 

 of dissections of different species of animals which, as his 

 editor justly says, " if published seriatim, would not only have 

 vied with the labours of Daubenton, as recorded in the 

 Histoire Naturelle, of Buffon, or with the Comparative Dissec- 

 tions of Vicq d'Azyr, which are inserted in the early volumes 

 of the Encyclopedic Mtthodigue and the Memoires de I' Academic 

 Eoyale de France, but would have exceeded them both together." 



In 1866 were published the first and second volumes, and 

 in 1868 the third volume, of Owen's own great book on the 

 Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrates. 



This is the most encyclopedic work on the subject 

 accomplished by any one individual since Cuvier's Lemons 

 d' Anatomic Compare, and contains an immense mass of 



