“I have many times,” says Mr. Clift, his assistant and amanuensis during the last twenty months of his life, “written the same page at least half a dozen times over, with corrections and transpositions almost without end,” so great was the difficulty Hunter felt in adequately expressing his ideas. But this only serves to increase our regret that these valuable originals should have been destroyed. He generally wrote his first thoughts or memoranda on all subjects on the slips torn off from the ends, and the blank pages and envelopes of letters. He appeared to have no desire of preserving his own hand-writing, but when they had been copied, usually folded them up, and put them on the chimney-piece to light the candle with; and the rough or waste copies on all subjects, when copied out fair, were taken into his private dissecting-room, as waste paper to dissect upon. Sir Everard Home[14] describes his brother-in-law as “very warm and impatient, readily provoked, and when irritated, not easily soothed. His disposition was candid and free from reserve, even to a fault. He hated deceit, and was above every kind of artifice; he detested it in others, and too openly avowed his sentiments. In conversation he spoke too freely, and sometimes harshly of his contemporaries; but if he did not do justice to their undoubted merit, it arose not from envy, but from a thorough conviction that surgery was yet in its infancy, and he himself a novice in his own art; and his anxiety to have it carried to perfection made him think meanly and ill of every one whose exertions in this respect did not equal his own.” He was called the Cerberus of the Royal Society, and certainly it appears easier to admire and estimate him correctly now than it would have been to live in comfort with him. Yet, when advanced in practice and honours, he paid more instead of less attention to those whom he had known earlier. Mr. Gough, who had charge of a menagerie in Piccadilly, related that when he called on Mr. Hunter, if the house was full of patients, and carriages waiting at the door, he was always admitted. “You have no time to spare,” said he, “as you live by it. Most of these can wait, as they have little to do when they go home.” It is certain that Hunter only valued money as it enabled him to carry on his researches. He introduces a patient to his brother thus: “He has no money, and you have plenty, so you are well met;” and he would never take fees from curates, authors, and artists. With his lack of courtliness and evident zeal for dissection, it can be no wonder that his income never reached £1000 before 1774. Yet afterwards it increased to £5000 for some years, and had reached to £6000 when he died. But all he could spare, throughout, went to his museum.