ON THE ORGANIZATION OF LIVING BEINGS. 1 
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scribblers, who ever crawl around them, catching at what may 
appear, and eagerly appropriating to themselves all they can 
grasp, and afterwards endeavour to palm such thefts upon the 
public as the original production of their own minds. That such 
occurrences do take place, every writer of celebrity can testify 
from bitter experience. The greatest men in connexion with me- 
dical science may be mentioned in particular as having under- 
gone these trials to a merciless extent : of such I may name, 
Harvey, Hunter, and Sir Charles Bell, of our own day; they 
each immortalized himself by the greatness of his disco- 
veries; they each received the grossest abuse; their thoughts 
and labours in the wide field of discovery were successively ridi- 
culed, denied, and afterwards claimed by others : these are facts 
so well known, that to dwell farther upon them would be a mere 
waste of time and words. I may remark, however, that “ pickers 
and stealers” of this nature arrange themselves into two classes ; 
first, those who boldly and with the most impudent assurance de- 
clare that they are the parents of such and such discoveries, and 
that they were the first to announce them to the world. Of this 
class I need not say much — their object is manifest at a glance ; 
and the only thing which excites our surprise is, the impudence 
displayed in the endeavour to cheat us out of our discernment 
by their virtually asserting that we are not in the possession of 
such a faculty. The second class, however, adopt quite the op- 
posite course : they assume a lofty, but at the same time a quiet 
tone of bearing; they glide in upon the reader with a face of the 
greatest possible modesty ; they allude to the writings and labours 
of others as though they conferred a favour upon them by so 
doing ; in short, they step composedly into the ranks of men of 
the highest acknowledged attainments with the assurance that the 
right of their doing so will never be questioned ; and with this 
seeming modesty the silent observer is pleased, until he begins to 
look somewhat closer, and then he discovers that the whole — to use a 
simile — are nothing more than jackdaws adorned with the feathers 
of the peacock. To strip such of their stolen plumage — to hold 
them up to the indignation of every honest and candid mind — is 
the duty of all who respect the pioneers of science and men of 
sterling merit. 
These remarks are elicited in consequence of reading what pre- 
tends to be an original “lecture on the organization of living beings,” 
by a Mr. Pearson B. Ferguson, of Dublin, and published in the 
Veterinary Record of July last, certain parts of which lecture I 
shall endeavour to shew are not original, but merely extracted 
from the works of various authors, without any acknowledgment 
from whence he has appropriated his materials. Such portions of 
