MODES OF STUDYING ANATOMY. 283 



of the structure of an animal in its totality, in order to understand how the 

 form or condition of one organ is related and necessitated by its functional 

 connexions with another, the coordination being adapted to the peculiar 

 habits and mode of life of that species, does not stop at that one species, 

 but has for its main end, the comparison of those associated modifica- 

 tions, interdependencies, or correlations of organs in all the different 

 species and classes of animals. 



The results of this way of anatomical research are made known 

 according to the class of animals inquired into — as, e. g., the anatomy of 

 Pishes, the anatomy of Birds, <fec, in contradistinction to the method 

 which governs the above-cited arrangement of Hunter's Physiological 

 Series of specimens, and the order of the descriptions in the ' Legons 

 d'Anatomie Comparee ' of Cuvier. 



But, in his general collection, Hunter illustrates all the three ways in 

 which the anatomy of animals may be broadly and philosophically fol- 

 lowed out. 



There is the series of organs in their mature state, traced from their 

 simplest to their most complex conditions, as in the first division of the 

 Physiological Series. 



There is a series of the progressive changes or stages in the develop- 

 ment of each organ in the embryo and foetus of different species, as, 

 e. g., in the second division of the same great Series. 



There is, thirdly, a series of entire animals, occasionally dissected to 

 show the general collocation of their organs, and arranged, as in the 

 Physiological Series, in the ascending order, commencing with the more 

 simple forms and proceeding gradationally to the Mammalia and to Man. 



The Council of this College has done me the honour to confide to me 

 the making of the Catalogues of these several exemplifications of animal 

 structures, and of the methods by which those structures may be studied. 

 And those Catalogues have been completed and published, with one 

 small exception relating to the Vertebrated province of the series 

 arranged according to the classes of animals. 



In the performance of another department of expository duties — 

 those which I have the privilege to fulfil in this theatre — I have, in 

 accordance with the terms of my appointment, and the aim which the 

 legislature had in view in attaching a Hunterian Professorship to the 

 acceptance by the College of the Hunterian Collection, endeavoured to 

 make the successive courses of lectures subservient to the elucidation, 

 not only of the science of Comparative Anatomy, and of the several 

 methods by which it may be studied, but of the Hunterian series of 

 specimens by which those several departments of zootomical science are 

 illustrated in the Museum. Thus the different systems and organs have 



