HUNTERIAN ORATION. 
153 
achromatic microscope of the present day. The microscope ap¬ 
peared to be effecting changes in their knowledge of nature no less 
wonderful than that effected by the telescope. He knew not 
which extreme was most calculated to excite reverence for their 
common Creator. The Council had not been unmindful of the 
benefits which anatomy, physiology, and surgery, might obtain by 
the microscope; they had purchased a large number of specimens 
at no trifling cost, the catalogue of which formed a splendid collec¬ 
tion of microscopic objects. The first volume, now on the eve of 
completion, would serve as a complete treatise upon anatomical 
physiology. 
He then referred to the use of the stethescope, and to electricity, 
which latter had been so successfully employed to bring life and 
healthy action into the diseased limb, and to destroy the vitality 
of a morbid growth. How fruitful a field of inquiry had been 
opened in the study of its influence upon the whole animal and 
vegetable economy, whether it were traced in its diurnal motion, 
or in the thunder-cloud and storm, unnoticed, except by the 
student, but affecting large portions of the globe! Might he not 
venture to ask, if they could not derive great lessons from the 
way in which these sciences were often cultivated] In reading 
the works of adventurous voyagers, such as Sir James Ross, they 
could not but be struck by the manner in which their knowledge 
was brought to bear upon science—the structure of the earth— 
the temperature of the waters—the different vegetable and animal 
productions of land and water—the tidal movements—the appear¬ 
ances of the heavenly bodies—and numerous other objects of 
interest. These observations were made amidst the dangers of 
the Antarctic regions; while in other latitudes similar results 
were considered and deliberately agreed upon by persons eminent 
in their several pursuits, by whom subsequently the whole were 
compared and analyzed, and their value duly weighed. Would 
not some such consultations advance medical science more steadily 
in the right direction, step by step] Would these not give a 
higher value to original discoveries; and would not, especially, 
such a system work well in their public medical institutions ] In 
each different hospital of the metropolis there was much local tra¬ 
ditional knowledge confined to its own pupils, in which there 
were peculiar modes of treatment; nay, their doctrines were so 
opposite, that a form of tumour, regarded at some schools as con¬ 
stitutional and cancerous, is regarded in others as fibrous and 
purely local. Hospitals were the only safe standards of statistical 
information. It could not be but that the united results preserved 
upon one concerted plan, for a few years, would afford a mass of 
valuable information now, in a great measure, lost or wasted; 
