Now and then Hunter amused himself with trying grotesque experiments upon life. The foregoing are examples of animal graftings—a human tooth growing from a cock’s comb, and a spur from the animal growing in the same way.
The physiological portion of the museum, which possesses by far the most interest to the general visitor, was the portion to which Hunter gave the main strength of his remarkable genius. Comparative anatomy was the delight of his life, and the practice of it seems to have formed his relaxation from other studies. Let us take the first glass case and inspect the leaf dissected by the winter weather, and trace up the series to that of the highest mammal, man, whose exquisite nervous system is dissected into filaments, even finer than those of the leaf, and we shall be able to estimate the enormous amount of labour presented by this portion of the collection. Here, if we may so speak, nature seems to sit in undress: first we see a perfect Noah’s ark of skeletons, or bony frameworks on which the softer parts are modelled and upheld. Then follow groups of dissections, preserved in spirit, by which the machinery of the different organs of animals are made patent to us. Every portion of the animal economy which is subservient to the preservation of the individual, or to the preservation of the race, lies here exposed to the view of the philosophical student. Motor organs, digestive organs, the absorbent, circulating, respiratory, nervous, and eliminative systems of the different orders of animal life, by the careful aid of the dissector’s scalpel, give up the history of their hidden functions to any one who enters this temple of science with a willing and inquiring mind.
When we reflect upon the enormous experience of the man who thus unveiled so large a portion of animal life to our scrutiny, we are tempted to ask, what literary records has he left of his life-long labours, the material evidence of which lies before us? It cannot be imagined that the observant mind of Hunter, after having laid bare, as it were, the constructive subtleties of Nature, had not obtained the key to many an enigma which still remains to puzzle natural philosophers; indeed, we know that he made careful notes of his observations in comparative anatomy, which extended to ten folio volumes of MS., besides many others on physiology and pathology. That Hunter placed great value on these volumes may be gathered from the fact that he introduced them himself into the grouping of his portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Of these manuscripts, more valuable perhaps than the museum itself, that picture contains the only visible representative; the originals having been committed to the flames by his brother-in-law Sir Everard Home, in order to conceal the theft he had made from them in his own numerous papers read to the Royal Society. A more astounding instance of literary incendiarism is not perhaps on record, and it affords us some clue to the degraded social character of the Georgian era in which the perpetrator of such an act lived, that it did not in any way appear to influence his position, much less to exclude him, as it should have done, from the society of all honest men.
TEMUJIN.
The Imperial mandate to Pekin
Hath summoned every Tartar lord;
The highest place to Temujin,
Who hath only fifteen summers seen,
The Tartars yield with one accord.
“Whence doth this froward youth derive,
His title to this high degree,
We deemed it our prerogative,
Precedence, honours, rank to give:
Who is the youth—whence cometh he?”
“For valour, skill, and enterprise,
This Mongol boy is more than man;
The foremost e’er where danger lies,
Amid your routed enemies,—
The Tartar nation hailed him Khan.”
“So young, yet held in such esteem,
He quarries at high game, forsooth!
His years such honours ill-beseem:
Dissolve we his ambitious dream,
This very night arrest the youth.”
In the Durbar with studied phrase
Of deep duplicity and guile,
The Emperor bids his peers give place
To the brave youth of Mongol race,
And greets him with most winning smile.
The court dismiss’d, the youth retires,
His tents are pitch’d beyond the walls;
No confidence that smile inspires—
The flattery suspicion fires:
To council all his friends he calls.
“This is no place for Temujin,—
Saddle my horse, I must away;
To-night I sleep not in Pekin,
For as I read the hearts of men,
That king smiles on me to betray.”
“Escaped! Shall we be baffled thus,
And by a beardless Mongol boy!
Leaves he the court unhid by us—
It is a treason dangerous;
The snake while young we must destroy.”
Proclaim’d a rebel with a price
Set on his head, young Temujin
For life across the desert flies.
Far in the west Mongolia lies;
Long is the road to Kra-Kooren.
A maiden at a cottage door
Sits plying hard her spinning-wheel;
Weak, weary, press’d by hunger sore,
A youth appears the maid before,
And asks the modest boon—a meal.
With ready hospitality
The maiden shares her humble store,
Prepares the mess of Tsamba tea,
Which while he swallows greedily,
A bed she spreads upon the floor.
