Page:The Hunterian oration, for the year 1819.djvu/29

Rh knowledge of anatomy, both human and comparative; for any reasoning with respect to function which is incompatible with the facts relating to structure must be invalid. He saw no mode by which function could be scientifically investigated, except by experiments made on living animals; yet in detailing these, we find frequent evidences of his being disturbed by those “compunctious visitings of nature” which every good mind must necessarily feel at inflicting sufferings on unresisting or subdued sensitive creatures, over which nature has given us dominion. He examined all the principal vital functions with particular attention, yet he found no spring of vital action except in irritability, which he believed to be a property of the muscular fibre alone. He investigated the process of formation, both in the growth and reparation of bones, and in the formation of the embryon in the egg, which he believed to be developed. It was not, however, till after thirty years of labour that he thought himself warranted to publish his Elementa Physiologiae, a work that certainly contains all that was then known on physiology, together with the alterations and improvements made by his