Mr. Abernethy was appointed in 1814, and had the rare success of conferring a lustre on the appointment, and the perhaps still more difficult task of sustaining, before his seniors and contemporaries, that unrivalled reputation as a lecturer which he had previously acquired. As Mr. Abernethy had been all his life teaching a more scientific surgery, which he believed to be founded on principles legitimately deducible from facts developed by Hunter; so every circumstance of time, place, and inclination, disposed him to bring Mr. Hunter's views and opinions under the review of the audience at the College, composed of his seniors, his contemporaries, and of pupils from the different schools. He was, we believe, equally desirous of disseminating them amongst the one class, and of having them considered by the others. At this time, no lectures of Mr. Hunter had been published; and Mr. Abernethy thought that, _to understand_ Hunter's opinions of the _actions_ of living bodies, it was expedient that people should have some notion of what Mr. Hunter considered to be the general nature of—"Life." We hold this point to be very important; for all experience shows that speculation on the abstract nature of things is to the last degree unprofitable. Nothing is so clear in all sciences as that the proper study of mankind is the Laws by which they are governed. Yet we cannot, in any science, proceed without something to give an intelligible expression to our ideas; which _something_ is essentially hypothetical. If, for example, we speak of light, we can hardly express our ideas without first supposing of light that it is some subtle substance sent off from luminous bodies, or that it consists in undulations; as we adopt the corpuscular or undulatory theory. It would be easy to form a third, somewhat different from either, and which would yet pretend to no more than to give a still more intelligible expression to phenomena. Now this is, as it appears to us, just what Mr. Abernethy did. He did not speculate on the nature of life for any other reason than to give a more intelligible expression to Mr. Hunter's other views. At that time there was nothing _published_, showing that Mr. Hunter's ideas of life were what Mr. Abernethy represented them to be; they might have been remembered by men of his own age, but this was not very good for controversy; and as that was made a point of attack[35], it is well that the since collected "Life and Lectures of John Hunter," by Mr. Palmer, have given us a written authority for the accuracy of Abernethy's representations.