When the elephant died at the Regent’s Park Gardens, a College student and an assistant were busily occupied for days dissecting the huge animal. When the rhinoceros expired at the same place, a portion of its viscera was hailed as a prize; and when the whale was cast, not long ago, upon the shores of the Thames, the watermen who claimed it as their booty, steamed off to the College to find a customer for portions of the unwieldy monster; nor were they disappointed. Beyond all these, there still remains another searcher out of materials for the scalpel and the microscope. He is a character in his way. By trade, half cattle-slaughterer half-oysterman, he is by choice a sort of dilettante anatomist. One day he is killing oxen and sheep in Clare Market, and the next is scouring the same market for morbid specimens “for Mr. Quickett, at the College.” He knows an unhealthy sheep by its looks, and watches its post mortem with the eye of a savant. Many a choice specimen has he caught up in his time from amongst the offal and garbage of that fustiest of markets in the fustiest of neighbourhoods. Indeed, through him, all that is unusual in ox, calf, sheep, fish, or fowl, found within the confines of Clare Market, finds its way to the “work shop” of the College to be investigated by scalpel and microscope. When a butcher is known to have any diseased sheep, our collector hovers about his slaughter-house, and that which is bad food for the public, often affords him and his patron a prize. He is a sort of jackal for the anatomists—a kind of cadger in the service of science—a veritable snatcher-up of ill-conditioned trifles.