Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/37

Rh tural phenomena, and endowed with a microscopic faculty of seizing and analysing their constituent parts and bearings. Grant that his inductions did not always bear him out, that his combinations were sometimes inaccurately formed, and his announcement of general laws sometimes premature; yet where in the calendar of time shall we look for an equal in the compass, the variety, or the depth of his researches into the mysteries of animal life, or for consequences such as those that have resulted from his labours to universal pathology?

When I claim him as the father of modern surgery, I am far from meaning to imply that our brethren the physicians have no part or lot in him. It is not in my province to point out the steps by which they have risen to their justly merited eminence. "Pardon me,” says one of the most enlightened of their body, “if I hold that Hunter was only nominally a surgeon : he belonged to no isolated district of our profession, and he is at this moment rendering a peculiar aid to the labours of physicians .”

The great improvement in our science derived from this source during the present century will be an enviable theme for future orators, when the lapse of a few years shall have rendered the generation that adorns it the legitimate property of the historian.

It will then appear that the progress of surgery in