I 



198 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. pt. hi. 



trace its gradual improvement, and understand it much more 

 perfectly. Aristotle and Vesalius had both of them com- 

 pared some of the parts of different animals, and so had 

 other and later zoologists ; but Haller was the first to make 

 it a regular study, and John Hunter, who lived about the 

 same time, devoted his whole life to it, and raised it to the 

 rank of a separate science. 



John Hunter, who was born in the County of Lanark, 

 in 1728, was the brother of a very eminent London phy- 

 sician, Dr. William Hunter, who was also a great anatomist. 

 John, being delicate, had been allowed to grow up with very 

 little education, and at twenty years of age he came up to 

 London, a mere ignorant lad, to try and help his brother in his 

 anatomical dissections. Here he soon showed that he had 

 plenty of ability, for he learnt dissecting so rapidly that at 

 the end of a year he was able to teach his brother's pupils, 

 and before long he became one of the leading surgeons at 

 St. George's Hospital, and had a large private practice. 



But though he made a great deal of money by his pro- 

 fession, he spent it all upon his favourite study of anatomy, 

 to which he devoted every spare moment. His great wish 

 was to compare thoroughly the different parts of men and 

 animals, so as to show how the life of each one of them is 

 carried on. For this purpose he dissected and preserved in 

 different ways the bodies of all the animals he could lay his 

 hands upon. He bought up all the wild beasts that died in 

 the Tower, where they were then kept, and any which he 

 could procure from travelling menageries, and he even kept 

 foreign animals himself in a piece of ground at Earl's Court, 

 Brompton, that he might watch their habits and dissect their 

 dead bodies. 



As years went on and his specimens increased he built a 



