There is one incident, however, in the Professor's labours which, for our own purposes, we must relate; because we shall have to refer to it in our humble exhortation to the public and the profession to believe in the practicability of raising Medicine and Surgery into a definite science. The incident shows what may be done by that mode of investigation which is the still delayed desideratum in medicine and surgery—namely, the _most comprehensive_ record of facts, and the study of their _minutest relations_. Professor Cuvier was the first to impress, in a special manner, that those beautiful relations in the structure of animals, so many of which are even popularly familiar, extended throughout the animal; so that if any one part, however apparently subordinate, were changed, so accurate were the adaptations in Nature, that all parts underwent some corresponding modification; so that diversity of structure in parts, more or less affected the whole. The beautiful result of all this is, that if these relations be once thoroughly mastered, then any one part necessarily suggests, in general terms, the nature of the animal to whom it belonged. Few instances, however, so remarkable as the one we are about to mention, could have been anticipated. A seafaring man brought a piece of bone, about three or four inches in length, as he said, from New Zealand, and offered it for sale at one or two museums; amongst others, at the College of Surgeons. We shall not here detain the reader by telling all that happened. These things are often brought with intent to deceive, and with false allegations. Most of those to whom the bone was submitted, dismissed it as worthless, or manifested their incredulity. Amongst other guesses, some rather eminent persons jocosely hinted that they had seen bones very like it at the London Tavern; regarding it, in fact, as part of an old marrow-bone, to which it bore, on a superficial view, some resemblance. At length it was brought to Professor Owen, who, having looked at it carefully, thought it right to investigate it more narrowly; and after much consideration, he ventured to pronounce his opinion. This opinion, from almost anybody else, would have been perhaps only laughed at; for, in the first place, he said that the bone (big enough, as we have seen, to suggest that it had belonged to an ox) had belonged to a bird. But before people had had time to recover from their surprise or other sensation created by this announcement, they were greeted by another assertion, yet more startling—namely, that it had been a bird without wings.