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XII. — Memoir of the Life and Writings o/" Robert Whytt, M.D., Professor of 

 Medicine in the University of Edinburgh from 1747 to 1766. By William 

 Seller, M.D., F.R.S.E., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. 



(Read 7tli April 1862.) 



It does not always happen that the memory of inquirers into nature, who 

 have the merit or the fortune to strike first into a right path, is cherished as it 

 deserves. This remark applies forcibly to the eminent person, whether regarded 

 as a physiologist or as a physician, of whose life and labours a brief memoir is 

 now laid before the Society. The name of Robert Whytt was familiar to his 

 contemporaries both at home and abroad. Increase of distance should hardly 

 yet have dimmed its lustre. Yet, in proportion as the views which he initiated 

 have expanded more and more in growing to maturity, the less and less is 

 heard of their author. Biography — which never did Whytt great justice — begins 

 already to put him aside. A few particulars of his life, with a catalogue of his 

 works, have hitherto been common in books of that description, principally in 

 those of Germany and France. In some newer French biographies his name has 

 dropped out. But of a late Edinburgh Biographical Dictionary, extending to not 

 a few volumes, while restricted to the lives of eminent Scotsmen, it will hardly 

 obtain credit that an early luminary of the rising University, conspicuous among 

 the European leaders of medical science during a busy period of the eighteenth 

 century, should, amidst a cloud of mediocrity, be there sought for in vain. 

 Robert Whytt, it may be said in defence, stands among the numerous followers 

 of Stahl, who ascribed the phenomena of life to the operation of a rational prin- 

 ciple ; while history contents itself with recording the views of the master, with- 

 out burdening its pages with the peculiarities of the disciple. But to place 

 Whytt among the followers of Stahl is to misinterpret the most essential points 

 of his belief. Nor is this error an unlikely source of the scanty justice awarded 

 to his merits. He, beyond doubt, embraced ideas subversive of Stahl's doc- 

 trines — ideas which have become the starting-point of views entering largely into 

 the present aspect of physiological science. 



In common, it is true, not only with the physiologists of the Stahlian school, 

 but with those of all the preceding schools of physiology from Hippocrates 

 downwards, Whytt traced animal movements to an anima or psyche ; but he 

 differed from Stahl, to borrow the description of Haller, so widely, that he 

 regarded such movements as being the inmiediate result of a stimulus, without 

 any reason, intention, or consciousness on the part of the anima. 



vol. xxiii. part I. 2 e 



