Hunter's method of investigation was highly inductive; and, whenever he adhered to it, the structure he has left is stable, and fit for further superadditions. Whenever he proceeded on any preconceived notions, or on an induction manifestly imperfect, his conclusions have, as we think, been proved unsound. His definition of disease, as distinct from accidental injury, is one instance which we formerly noticed in our own works; and some of his conclusions in regard to poisons—as mercury, for example—will not hold; but all that Abernethy made use of, either in developing his own views or maturing their practical applications, were sound and most careful deductions from obvious and incontrovertible facts. Abernethy took equal care to deduce nothing from them, or from anything of his own observations, but the most strictly logical inferences—conclusions which were, in truth, little more than the expression of the facts, and therefore irrefragable. He showed that, however dissimilar in kind, nervous disturbance was the essential element of disease; and that the removal of that disturbance was the essential element of cure. That no mode should be neglected, therefore, which was capable of exerting an influence on the nervous system; but that, whether he looked at the subject as mere matter of fact, or as assisted by the phenomena of health or disease generally, or merely to that which was _most within our power_, no more potential disturbers of the nervous system were to be found, than disordered conditions of the digestive organs; and that the tranquillizing of these must always be a leading object in our endeavours to achieve the still greater one of tranquillizing nervous disorder.