Page:The Hunterian Oration 1832.djvu/25

21 tember, at a period when he was nearly twenty-one years of age.

Dr. William Hunter was an eloquent lecturer,—a good scholar,—an indefatigable man of business,— pleasant in his address, and, at that time one of the first anatomists in Europe, ranking with cotemporaries of no less eminence than Monro, of Edinburgh, and Meckel, of Berlin. With such endowments, he soon attained professional reputation and independence. Whether John Hunter, without the assistance of such a brother, would have surmounted all impediments to his rise in the world, is a problem, which it is now impossible to solve. For my own part, with every due allowance for the power of his genius and industry, I incline to the belief, that, without the advantages procured for him by his brother's early patronage, he could not have succeeded in doing many of those things, for which his name is likely to be immortal.

,—You know very well what Pliny says upon this topic : "Neque cuiquc tarn statim clarum in-