Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/563

Rh the arts by which an audience can be fascinated; but he never lost his suave demeanor and high respect for his class as a body of gentlemen. His movements were graceful, and his gestures, now slow and now rapid, had a rare felicity and pertinence to the matter in hand. His style, his illustrations, and insinuating speech, lent a marvelous fascination to his subject, and he stood before his class the impersonation of lofty intellect and perfect self-possession. He was an ideal lecturer. The area of his class-room was to Knox a charmed circle. There he exercised a weird influence that traversed from side to side the thronged benches and subtly pervaded the mind of every member of his audience.

As a consequence of these traits, of the solidity and breadth of his knowledge, and of the consummate art of his delivery. Dr. Knox was to an extraordinary degree popular with his classes. At all times accessible and ready to offer kindly and encouraging counsel, he became the "guide, philosopher, and friend," of every worthy student. His pupils loved him and lauded him to the skies, and his anatomical classes were larger than any other ever assembled in Britain. Country physicians rode twenty miles to attend his introductory lectures. "The benches of Knox's class-room were occupied by a scholarly, earnest, and appreciative class; the majority were strictly medical students, but mingling with these were English barristers, Cambridge scholars and mathematicians, Scottish advocates and divines, scions of the nobility, artists, and men of letters. The zoölogists and naturalists flocked to Knox for their comparative anatomy. Genera! students looked upon him as the great master of his art, and fully indorsed the encomiums bestowed upon him by Audubon and others of still greater eminence, both Continental and Transatlantic. Military and naval surgeons, in active service or on half-pay, often mingled with the crowd. Cultivated men of all kinds were attracted by his fame, and looked upon his instructions as the greatest intellectual treat afforded them in the modern Athens; while among his students it was remarked that the higher their intellectual grade, the more profound was their admiration of his genius and their personal attachment to him."

As an indication of how Dr. Knox was regarded by bis class, his biographer states: "There was a struggle to obtain good places in Knox's lecture-room each day at eleven o'clock. The first year's students attending chemistry, and the second year's men attending surgery, between the hours of ten and eleven, were the chief claimants for Knox's front seats. The university, from whose class-rooms the majority of Knox's men came to hear his morning lecture, was about three minutes' walk from Old Surgeons' Hall—Knox's place. The competitors in their flight down two staircases, from Hope's Chemistry Rooms, their racing across the quadrangle of the university, their sweeping rush over every obstacle to gain Infirmary Street,