Observations on certain parts of the animal oeconomy. Inclusive of several papers from the Philosophical transactions, etc / by John Hunter ... With notes by Richard Owen.
- John Hunter
- Date:
- 1840
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Observations on certain parts of the animal oeconomy. Inclusive of several papers from the Philosophical transactions, etc / by John Hunter ... With notes by Richard Owen. Source: Wellcome Collection.
476/494 page 468
![42, DESCRIPTIONS OF SOME ANIMALS FROM NEW | SOUTH WALES. ? BY JOHN HUNTER, F.R.S. [Tue following descriptions ate interesting, not less from being the first that appeared of some of the most singular of the qua- drupeds which characterize the Fauna of Australia, than from the celebrity of their author, of whose contributions to descriptive zoology they are almost the only examples. They form part of the zoological appendix to a “Journal of a voyage to New South Wales, 4to. 1790,” published by John White, Esq., Surgeon-General to the settlement, who thus acknowledges the assistance which he derived from the gentlemen by whose codperation he was “ enabled to surmount those difficulties that necessarily attended the descrip- tion of so great a variety of animals, presented for the first time to the observation of the naturalist, and consequently in the class of nondescripts. Among those gentlemen he has the honour particu- larly to reckon the names of Dr. Shaw, Dr. Smith, the possessor of the celebrated Linnzean Collection; and John Hunter, Esq., who to a sublime and inventive genius, happily unites a disinterested and generous zeal for the promotion of natural science.” Dr. Shaw, who superintended the publication of White’s Zoolo- gical Appendix, thus introduces the observations contributed by Hunter :— | «The nondescript animals of New South Wales occupied a great deal of Mr. White’s attention, and he preserved several specimens of them in spirits, which arrived in England in a very perfect state. There was no person to whom these could be given with so much propriety as Mr. Hunter, he, perhaps, being most capable of ex- notice of it in the Ossemens Fossils of Cuvier, we must suppose that it could have been but very imperfectly known to the great founder of oryctological science. In the chapter on the ‘Ours Fossiles,’ Cuvier says: ‘Le célébre chirurgeon anglais, J. Hunter, dans un Mémoire sur les os fossiles, qui n’a que leur analyse chimique pour objet, et qui est inséré dans les Transactions Philosophiques, donne deux belles figures de cranes d’ours fossiles les meillures qui aient parn jusque la, mais sans déscription détaillée, et en disant pour toute comparaison que les différentes tétes d’ours de cavernes différent autant entre elles qu’elles different de Pours polaire, et que toutes ces différences ne surpassent point celles que l’age peut produire dans les animaux carnassiers ; assertion vague et méme erronée.”’—Loe, cit., p. 237. A careful and candid perusal of Hunter’s Memoir would doubtless have exonerated the author from this charge in the mind of Cuvier, as it must do in that of every unprejudiced reader. But it would still afford a very inadequate notion of the extent to which Hunter had pursued his study of fossil remains. The interest that he took in them is shown by the frequent exhortations towards their collecticn in his letters to Jenner, and his collection at his decease included about 1050 specimens, of which there are 259 belonging to the vertebrate classes (including 70 specimens of fossil fishes, and 40 of reptiles), 116 cephalopods, 116 univalves, 143 bivalves, 35 crustacea, 163 i ves, stac ech and 50 fossil vegetable productions.] Ce ee ae](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33292292_0476.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
