Introductory lecture to the course of comparative anatomy, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, February 14, 1870 / by William Henry Flower.

  • Flower, William Henry, 1831-1899.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory lecture to the course of comparative anatomy, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, February 14, 1870 / by William Henry Flower. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    estimate in which many of his published works are heldj and it is this which was, I suspect, the reason why his published writings bear so small a pro- portion to the vast mass of rough manuscript which he left behind him, especially on the subjects with which we are at present engaged. The perusal of the work just mentioned will show how, while occuj)ied with a large and anxious prac- tice—in itself labour enough for ordinary men— while cultivating with what I might describe as a passionate energy the sciences of physiology and pathology, while collecting and arranging a museum such as never has been formed before or since by a single individual, he had also carefully recorded a series of dissections of difFerent species of animals which, as his learned editor justly says, if published seriatim, would not only have vied with the labours of Daubenton as recorded in the ^ Histoire Naturelle ’ of Buffon, or with the ‘ Comparative Dissections ’ of Vicq d’Azyr, which are inserted in the early volumes of the Encyclo- pedie Me'thodique and in the Memoires de VAcademie Royale de France, but they would have exceeded them both together.* In fact, they would have established Hunter’s fame as by far the greatest contributor to the knowledge of animal structure of his time, and, what is more important, would have aided most materially in the advancement and diffusion of that knowledge. * Palmer’s edit. voL iv. p. vi.