Mr. Hunter left little but his museum, which he wished the nation to purchase and provide for. After years of effort, in the course of which Mr. Pitt, on being appealed to, replied: “What! buy preparations! why, I have not money enough to purchase gunpowder,” Parliament in 1799 voted £15,000 for his museum (it had cost Hunter over £70,000), and its guardianship was offered to the College of Physicians, which declined it, and then to the College of Surgeons, which accepted it, gaining at the same time a new charter and the title of Royal. Hours during which the collection might be open for professional men and others to study, and a keeper to explain the collection, were stipulated for, and at least twenty-four lectures were to be given annually on comparative anatomy and other subjects by members of the college. These are the well-known Hunterian lectures made illustrious by Owen, Huxley, Parker, and Flower. The collection was placed in a temporary habitation in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1806, and Parliament has granted in all £42,500 at various dates for the building of a suitable museum. The present building, however, has cost very much more than the sum mentioned, the expense being defrayed out of the college revenues for diplomas. During the weary years of waiting for the government consent to purchase the museum, Hunter’s family had to be maintained by the sale of his furniture and library, and his miscellaneous collection of objects of _virtu_, coats of mail, weapons, &c.; and the mere conservation of the museum was a matter of considerable expense. His papers fell into the hands of Mr., afterwards Sir Everard Home, who detained them without publishing them for many years, during which time he himself published a vast variety of papers under his own name in the Philosophical Transactions. It is generally believed that many of these were largely derived from Mr. Hunter’s manuscripts; and this the more, that, when at last, after many years of evasion, his co-trustees of the museum pressed him to deliver up the manuscripts as they were, he secretly burnt almost the whole of them. In fact, Mr. Clift, who became keeper of the museum, and had been long the assistant and friend of Sir Everard, when questioned by the Commission on Medical Education, replied that all his life he had been employed by Sir Everard in transcribing portions of Mr. Hunter’s manuscripts, and in copying drawings from his portfolios, which Sir Everard issued to the public as his own. It was in 1823, when Sir Everard had received from the printer the final proof of his last volume on Comparative Anatomy, that he disgraced his name for ever by this great and irreparable destruction. Mr. Clift’s list of what he remembers of the burnt papers fills more than a page of the memoir of John Hunter prefixed to vol. x. of Jardine’s Naturalists’ Library. And the bare enumeration and contents would give but little idea of the labour expended in its production.