Some, who had never thought much on the subject, and were very ill-disposed to begin, regarded his ideas as exaggerated, and hastily dismissed the subjects, with the conclusion that he was a clever man, but too full of theory, and too much disposed to look to the stomach or the digestive organs. Others, making very little distinction between what they heard of the man, the book, or his practice, and probably not having seen either, but deriving only a kind of dreamy notion of a clever man with many peculiarities, would say that he was mad, or an enthusiast. Still, a great many of the thinking portion of the public and the profession held a different tone. The book was recognized as an intelligible enunciation of definite views—rather a new thing in medical science. The application of them became more and more general; his pupils were everywhere disseminating them, more or less, in the navy, in the army, in the provinces, and in America. Still, it must not be imagined that his principles became diffused with that rapidity which might have been inferred from his numerous and attentive class. Constituted as medical education is, but more especially as it was at that time—for it is _slowly_ improving—pupils were almost entirely absorbed in the conventional requisitions for examination. There, they were not questioned as to the laws of the animal economy, nor any _laws_ at all, nor even on any real axioms in approximation to them; but simply as to plain anatomy, the relative situation of parts, and such of the ordinary surgery of the day as had received the approbation of the Examiners, who were, for the time, the authorities in the profession. Therefore, out of a large number, there were comparatively few whose attentions were not too much absorbed by the prescribed curriculum of hospital routine to study principles: a curriculum constructed as if the object were to see how much could be learnt in a short time, without detriment to the very moderate requisitions of the examination at the College of Surgeons. But if comparatively few had time to study Abernethy's lectures at the time, a great many had treasured up his remarks. As the impressions we receive in our childhood, before we are capable of thinking of their value, are vividly rekindled by the experience of real life, so many of the more suggestive lessons of Abernethy's lectures, which passed comparatively unheeded at the time, or were swamped in the "getting up" of the requisitions for an examination at the College, recurred in after days in all their force and truthfulness. Many, however, with more time, and perhaps more zeal, endeavoured to thoroughly master his views; and now and then he was gratified by evidence, that time had only served to mature the conviction of the pupils—in dedications and other complimentary recognitions, in the works of such of them as had been induced to publish any portion of their own experience.