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To this last institution the surgeons of every country will for ever look back with gratitude;
yet, its warmest admirers must admit, that something was required for its perfection, which even the powerful monarch, who so nobly patronized and protected it, was not able to bestow:—need I say, that it wanted a John Hunter amongst its members, to exemplify
how the dry facts of surgery might be studied in union with philosophy and science? And, whose genius would have communicated to its
well written memoirs, a value more sterling; even than that of their language, corrected, as it was, by the pens of a Quesnay, a Morand,
and a Louis.
I may truly say, Mr. President, that we shall not find in the productions of that academy, nor in any other work extant at the period, when John Hunter began his matchless investigations, any tolerably good account of the nature of inflammation, that process in the animal body, with which almost every disease is more or less connected. Until his time, we shall in vain search authors for
