showed his good nature by the pleasure that the civil things that were said to me gave him. In short, one gentleman-not the least important in that fraternity-Kater, called it the first discovery of the age.'

'June 10, 1822.-My discoveries have made more impression in France than here; and I have received a second message from Majendie, saying that if I would send him any short account, I should have the prize-medal. This is a ridiculous thing for an old fellow but I mean it to recoil on them here, and therefore I design not to fob them off with a repetition of the old Papers, but something better calculated for the meridian of Paris, and to show new facts by a suite of novel experiments. If I was not poor, and had no plagues, how happy I could make myself.'

These were his last hours of scentific peace. Those attempts which were made, both at home and abroad, to wrest from Bell the merit of his discoveries commenced in 1822; nor were they concluded until after his death. In December, 1822, he felt his position, and gathered up his strength to bear the storm. . This must be,' he says, 'the mode in which my opinions shall come to be acknowledged: without some agitation and controversy, they would never be propagated. I am satisfied I have a secure ground.' From this moment he maintained an indignant silence, rarely, if ever, taking any part in the disputes which his relations, co-operators, or favourite pupils conducted. He went on, to the last moment of his existence, adding knowledge to knowledge, as diligently as if he had felt the peace of mind which he knew not; but the whole subject of his discoveries on the Nerves had been rendered so distasteful to him, that he could not read even the controversy. Like most men of a high stamp, he had the power of casting off the troubles of the soul, and immersing his whole being in some new pursuit.

The honours of his profession, however, now followed him. In July, 1824, the College of Surgeons requested him to accept their senior chair of anatomy and surgery; and he accepted it with gratification and hope.

"You naturally say, what advantage comes of this? It is the only distinction the profession can bestow-good, if we can make good out of it, and bad if we cannot fill it. I hope to draw not the students only, but the surgeons to come back to school again, to show what we have done since their day. I must confess, too, I lack advancement—I am weary without excitement-and this I think will carry me on a few years longer, with interest in life, which was beginning to fail consumedly.'

To the last moment Bell was a conscientious teacher; he never gave a single lecture, even to a limited class, without much preparation. He had the highest notions with regard to the duties of a teacher :-to him they were most sacred, as making him answerable for the dissemination of opinions which were to

be

be tested on human life. In his new position, therefore, great was his anxiety:—with an audience composed of the seniors of his profession, the older students of every school ready to draw comparisons between their own oracle and the college professor, besides a crowd of gentlemen who hover on the confines of science, Bell confesses to have felt something very much akin to nervousness;-but never so much as when, one day, he descried the capacious white head and cold impassable look of that sagacious old man Cline. But the success of the course was greatthe most learned of the audience were the most pleased, and all for a time seemed to smile on the professor.

It was this series of lectures at the College which, having strongly excited public interest, formed the publication entitled 'Animal Mechanics,' by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1828-1829);-30,000 copies of the two sixpenny pamphlets, containing Bell's views of the uses of Anatomy, were sold within three years. As early, however, as 1818, when his mind was teeming with ideas—when he was crying out for time to bring forward his nervous system-his anatomy of expressionwhen he longed for leisure to enter upon some experiments on the circulation of the blood, to prove that there is a principle quite overlooked in Physiology and Philosophy, viz., that there is an attraction betwixt the blood and the solids, and that therefore is the feeble heart equal to the circulation,'-even as early as March, 1818, we find him writing: I have requested a conference with Rennie, the engineer, on the uses of anatomy, by which I shall show them how God Almighty makes arches, ropes, and many other things they attempt.'

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Two other kindred works-his Bridgewater Treatise' and his Illustrations of Paley's Natural Theology,' written in conjunction with Lord Brougham-were offshoots of the train of idea contained in the treatise on 'Animal Mechanics;' and the noble theme of the wisdom and goodness of the Creator will scarcely find a more profound comment than is exhibited in these volumes. Yet Bell had, at the commencement, many misgivings about undertaking the Paley.'

March, 1835.- Having written the Animal Mechanics and the Bridgewater, I feel that I have done enough on that subject for the present: if I could gain a little leisure, if I had a little country retirement, or were I so ill as to be excused from business, I know no occupation that would be more delightful; but with the pressures of business and of anxieties of another kind, I fear I can do no justice to such a subject. A man should feel deeply and be pleased with every thing around him before he can possess himself of that tone of mind necessary to such an undertaking. If there be any "best bits" in the Essay on

the

the Hand, they were written after a day of complete retirement and relaxation at Panshanger and Chenies. I have tasked myself pleasantly while throwing a line, how I should express my thoughts on returning to the little inn. It is then that one has the justest and fairest views of nature, which I believe would never rise into the mind of him who has the pressure of business on him, at least such business as mine. There is another occasion which has never failed to animate me with just views —that is, when my class is gathered about me and when I enter into the feelings of young men, and am anxious to answer their enthusiastic desire of knowledge and to afford them just and consolatory views of nature. It is long since I had enjoyed this sort of animating intercourse.'

It was on reasons so grounded that Bell defended his passion for fishing, into the practice of which gentle craft he was seduced by his early friend John Richardson of Fludyer Street. At first he was a most awkward handler of the rod; but by diligent practice in his drawing-room '(!) of an evening, in acquiring those incommunicable delicacies of motion of the wrist by which the fly is so floated as to become irresistible temptation to the fish, he achieved skill worthy of being exercised in company with such masters of the art as Sir Humphrey Davy, Sir Francis Chantrey, Dr. Babington, Mr. Penn, Mr. Richardson, and latterly the poet Wilson-and counted many a golden hour of happiness spent by wood and stream with such minds and hearts. His carriage,

when he made a tour with his wife and his unscathed' dog, was carefully packed with all the appliances of his sport, a few chosen volumes, and the unfailing sketch-book. In the heat of the sun the neighbouring tree gave him shade, while he sketched the scenery around, and listened to some favourite author, until a passing cloud enabled him once more to ply the rod with hope of success. This sport so conducted he called his country house;' and looked on it as the source of his health, as it surely was of no little of his happiness.

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26th July, 1824.-I must vindicate my fishing. To long for increase of business is to solicit increase of torture. I must do an operation to-morrow, which makes me to-day quite miserable; and so it is that in looking to increase of reputation and business, I have not only the conviction that great blockheads have enjoyed all this before me, but that I am providing for a relay and continued supply of suffering. Then again I am confined here to the brick walls and dusty streets; if I make an effort, I cannot with all my diligence get out of the noise of wheels. If some miles from town I accidentally stand still, I feel what perhaps I have not for months perceived, the absence of din; and when I feel the fresh breeze, see the clouds high over head, and the fresh verdure around us, I naturally exclaim "What have I got in exchange for this?" My philosophy tells me that to study to be happy, we must

study

study to be natural, to take what God has sent us, has liberally supplied us with appetite to enjoy.

'Yet to enjoy the country it is not merely necessary to be in it. The citizen goes down with high enjoyment-for a time he is as frisky as a dog let out to snuff and run in the open fields. But after a turn or two he begins by habit to pull out his watch, to wish for dinner, to be weary looking about him and to have no occupation-and he finds that the change he has attempted is absurd and unnatural to his habits. Is it not something to provide against this humiliating and painful confession of the poor artificial creature-man ? Therefore I say, have some pastime and this is mine. How delightful it is to find yourself in a spring day by the side of a stream in a meadow, the fine sloping hills around you, with their dropping trees and broken woods, with your tackle and rod preparing! Look around-you enjoy the solitude, the loneliness of nature-for when once begun, the interest is too intense-you wish for rain, for wind-for then the trouts rise freely. But there is a sort of inward sense and consciousness of where you are-that you breathe a pure air, and are fatigued without being exhausted, without lassitude and you see the day rise, and you see it full noon, and you see it decline; and it is all too short-hours and days speed away too rapidly for enjoyment.

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Then if you enjoy a wilder scene-trees, rocks, torrents-how delightful to stand in the very middle of the stream, or near a stream! cloud passes over the sun, and suddenly the bright waters take a frowning darkness, and then is the time you feel the jerk at your elbow, which none but a fisher can speak of—but that varying darkness of the brown rushing waters, the streams, the pools, the rocks, the fantastic trees-go round the world, you shall not see these unless you take a fishing-rod in your hand-then you are led to scenes that will even break the eagerness of your pursuit, and make you pause in admiration. 'With all this of nature, there is an additional charm in a very little matter. Man, I am convinced, enjoys the work of his hands, the adjustment of his tackle, the neatness, fitness, and nicety of the whole apparatus the study of the flies on the water, as well as those in your book the judgment displayed in the adaptation of rod and line, and fly, to wind, and rain, and fish, and morning, and mid-day, and evening these form exactly that gentle exercise of the talents that suits recreation.'

But we must not lose curselves at Chenies or Ancrum; nor must it be concealed from young practitioners that scarcely even to a man of Bell's fame, who had done so much for the world, was allowance always made for the extent to which he indulged his propensity for the piscator's art.

The loss of his affectionate assistant, John Shaw, in 1827, occasioned great inconvenience to Bell in the management of the school in Windmill Street; perhaps he never afterwards considered that business with much satisfaction. The school

itself, however, received its coup de grace from the establishment of the London University, and subsequently of the King's College. It was impossible that any private school could compete with corporate bodies having the command of great funds. and the absolute interest of great sections of the public; and the result has been, that the minor schools of medicine have been merged in these, and that even the larger and more useful have been much damaged. Perhaps the best consummation to be desired for medicine would be, the establishment of lectures in the King's and University Colleges, open to distinguished hospital physicians and surgeons, after the example of the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, while the various metropolitan hospitals should be restricted to clinical instruction only. At this moment medicine is overridden with lecturers and undertaught by practitioners.

Seeing the inevitable downfall of his own school, Bell was induced to accept the chair of Physiology in the London University, with, as he states, a carte blanche as to its regulation in the teaching of anatomy. But a host of lecturers under various denominations were appointed by the council, composed of gentlemen little conversant with the wants of medical instruction; and the result was, in the words of Bell,

that five gentlemen were engaged in teaching human anatomy; and three certainly were lecturing in the same class-room on the same subjects, and with the same preparations put on the table three successive times in the same day.'

As a natural consequence to Bell's exalted notions of a teacher, within a few days after the first opening of the University he tendered his resignation; and a short time after, from a variety of petty circumstances, he withdrew altogether. He was now without any means of support but his practice, and that he disliked : all his objects of ambition-his darling thoughts-his plans for ameliorating his profession-were at an end. And if the reader have ever known, as we fervently hope he may not have seen, his one sole hope fade and die away, while his own vigorous life within him promised a protracted contemplation of misery, he may perhaps realise what Bell felt at that moment.

His fame was at this period more extensive than that of any of his contemporaries. Cuvier, when he visited this country, would wait on Bell, and after quitting it often wrote to him; and on his deathbed bore that remarkable testimony to Bell's discoveries which Mrs. Lee Bowditch relates:—' He pointed out the seat of his disorder, observing, "Ce sont les nerfs de la volonté qui sont malades,"-alluding to the late beautiful discoveries of Sir Charles Bell.' Larrey would not be denied, but insisted on dining

VOL. LXXII. NO. CXLIII.

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