In this state of things, John Hunter began a beautifully simple, and, in its bearings on surgery, we may add, a new mode of inquiry. He saw that there was much in all animals that was common, and that there were analogies in the whole organic kingdom of nature; hence he sought to develop, by observation of the various processes in various animals, and their nearest analogies in vegetables also, the _true relations_ of the phenomena observable in man. It was not that he did that which had never been attempted before, in the abstract, but that he undertook it with a new, a concentrated unity of purpose. He did not employ, as it were, a different instrument to collect the rays of light from surrounding nature; but he concentrated them into a focus on a different object—the nature and treatment of disease. His labours, though not permitted to endure for many years, interrupted by indisposition, and suddenly stopped by death, were abundantly fruitful; they enabled him to simplify much of surgery that was officious and hurtful, and to correct many errors. He first gave a reason for this or that proceeding, founded on actual observation of natural processes: thus, in healing of wounds, the natural and healthy were distinguished from unnatural and unhealthy processes, and so forth. But as Mr. Hunter's enlarged views taught him the the value of the _relations_ observable throughout the whole animal creation, he contemplated _parts_ of the body only as a step to the more successful observation of the _whole_. As before stated, he observed the phenomena exhibited by the various organs, both separately and in connection; traced them with elaborate circumspection, and concluded by justifying what Abernethy said, when he observed: "Hunter proved that the whole body sympathized with all its parts." Now, many of the facts which Mr. Hunter remarked in the relations established between different parts of the body, were, in the strictest sense, axiomatic—that is, they were exemplifications of laws to which they were the necessary steps. Take one for example: that the part sympathetically affected by an impression primarily made on another part, appeared to be frequently _more disturbed_ than the part with which it had appeared to sympathize. This we now know to be no exception, but rather the law; because the exceptions (as we contend[82]) are explicable; but that was not then perceived. Abernethy, however, made use of this so far as to impress the fact, that organs might be seriously disordered without there being _apparently_ any symptoms referable to them.