52 Proceedings of the Newport Natural History Society. 
Two years later, in 1775, after he had become fairly 
settled at home, he received a formal proposal from his 
late preceptor, Hunter, to return to London and perma¬ 
nently join him in lecturing. Hunter’s wish was to estab¬ 
lish a School of Natural History, upon a scale then unknown 
in England. To show to you what this really meant, as 
an extraordinary endorsement by Hunter of Jenner’s attain¬ 
ments as an observer, one fitted to teach, and as a skilled gen¬ 
eral naturalist, it is necessary that I give you a brief sketch of 
the great John Hunter himself. From him Jenner had 
drawn inspiration. Had he accepted Hunter’s invitation, 
he would at once, as his coadjutor, have been placed upon 
one of the highest pinnacles then possible in the scientific- 
world. At this period Jenner was twenty-six years old, 
and Hunter forty-seven. The one just entering active life, 
and the other at its prime. The one already most favora¬ 
bly known, by two years’ personal intercourse, to Hunter’s 
wide circle of scientific intimates, the other at the very 
zenith of his fame. The temptation must have been remark¬ 
ably seductive. Had he yielded to it, Jenner would doubt¬ 
less have become one of the leading naturalists of his time, 
but avoiding, as he would naturally have done, the field of 
active practice, small-pox would possibly to this day have 
remained triumphant, and have decimated us all, while 
the modern science of biology — for Pasteur, Koch and the 
host of contemporary observers and discoverers have but 
followed in the footsteps of Jenner, as Tyndall and even 
Pasteur himself have acknowledged — would have been but 
an universe as yet unrevealed. 
John Hunter, besides having a profound knowledge of 
the human frame, both normal and irregular, was also 
equally proficient as a comparative anatomist; that is, from 
having studied similarly an amazing number of the lower 
mammals, alike as regards their bony, muscular, nervous 
and other systems, he was intimately versed in their resem¬ 
blances and dissimilarities to ourselves. He had made 
special investigations into the physiology of the hibernating 
