Now, we happen to know a good deal of this story; and that the incredulity and doubt with which the opinion was received were too great, for a time, even for the authority of Professor Owen to dispel. But mark the truthfulness of a real science; contemplate the exquisite beauty and accuracy of relation in nature! By and by, a whole skeleton was brought over to this country, when the opinion of the Professor was converted into an established fact. Nor was this all; there was this appropriate symbol to perpetuate the triumph: that which had appeared as the most startling feature of what had been scarcely better received than as a wild conjecture, was so accurate in fact, as to form the most appropriate name to the animal thus discovered[76]. It would be unjust to others to attribute Professor Owen's appointment exclusively to Abernethy: that, the state of things did not place within his single power; but his penetration was the first to suggest, and his weight most potential in securing, an appointment which various circumstances, besides the merits of the individual, bring up in high relief, as the best ever made by the London College of Surgeons. To return to the Hospital System, as affecting Abernethy. He continued to lecture, and the emoluments arising thence he of course enjoyed. Until 1815, the whole of the hospital fees had been taken by the surgeons in chief. These fees, in twenty-eight years (allowing a reasonable deduction for those pupils who went to the school independently of the inducement offered by the most attractive lecturer ever known), must have amounted to an enormous sum. Having founded the school, he became surgeon at about fifty years of age; and then retired at sixty-two. On retiring, unpleasant discussions arose, which, with others long antecedent, rendered his concluding associations with the hospital scarcely more agreeable than they had been at the College of Surgeons. The whole of Abernethy's closing career gave him no reason to rejoice at the Hospital System. The circumstances, though they convey a lesson in the History of the Lives of Men of Genius, were, abstractedly, extremely unimportant. They show that Abernethy, in his retiring hours, whilst his reputation had become European, and Transatlantic[77]—whilst hundreds were benefiting their fellow creatures, more or less, according to their talents and opportunities, in every part of the world—seems to have been surrounded by men who, so far as we can see, were little disposed to grace his retirement either with much sympathy, or even with reasonably generous appreciation of all that he had done, either for Science in general, or the Hospital in particular.