"Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thine own Life\'s key: be check\'d for silence,
But never tax\'d for speech. What Heaven more will,
That thee may furnish, and my prayers pluck down,
Fall on thy head!"
All\'s Well that ends Well.

In reviewing the facts of the foregoing controversy, we are anxious to restrict our remarks to such points as fall within the proper scope of our present object. These appear to us to relate to the mode in which Mr. Abernethy conducted his argument, as being legitimate or otherwise; secondly, the influence the whole affair had in developing one of the most important features in his character; and, lastly, the impression it produced, for good or evil, on the public mind, in relation to our profession.

We would observe, in the first place, that the difficulty of Mr. Abernethy\'s position was very painful and peculiar. We are not learned in controversy; but we should imagine that position to have been almost without parallel. Mr. Lawrence had been his pupil. As we have seen, Mr. Abernethy had been his patron and his friend; and, moreover, he had been not a little instrumental in placing Mr. Lawrence in the Professor\'s chair. This instrumentality could not have been merely passive. Mr. Abernethy himself was not a senior of the Council at that time. At all events, he was associated at the College with men much older than himself, and must have owed any influence in the appointment to an active expression of his wishes, supported by that189 attention to them which, though not necessarily connected with his standing at the College, was readily enough, no doubt, conceded to his talents and his reputation. His singleness of mind in this business was the more amiable, because, had he been disposed to be inactive, there were not wanting circumstances which might not unnaturally have induced some hesitation on the subject. In the postscript at the end of Mr. Abernethy\'s published Lectures, delivered at the College, we learn that, "From an early period of his studies, Mr. Lawrence had been accustomed to decry and scoff at what I taught as Mr. Hunter\'s opinions respecting life and its functions; yet," he adds, "as I never could find that he had any good reason for his conduct, I continued to teach them in the midst of the controversy, and derision of such students as had become his proselytes," &c.

This could hardly have been very agreeable. The pupils were wont to discuss most subjects in their gossips in the Square of the hospital, or elsewhere; and many a careless hour has not been unprofitably so employed. On such occasions, those who were so inclined would no doubt use ridicule, or any other weapon that suited their purpose; and so long as any reasonable limits were observed, Mr. Abernethy was the last person likely to take notice of anything which might have reached him on the subject. On the contrary, it was his excellence, and his often-expressed wish that we should canvass every subject for ourselves; and he would enforce the sincerity of his recommendation by advising us with an often-repeated quotation:

    "Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri."

Still, we cannot conceive that the desultory discussions at the hospital, of which he might from time to time have accidentally heard, could have prepared him to expect that a similar tone was to form any portion of the sustained compositions of Lectures to be delivered in Lincoln\'s Inn Fields. When, however, he found his opinions ridiculed there, by his friend and pupil, what was to be done? Was he to enter into a direct personal sort of controversy with his colleague in office at the College of Surgeons?

There was everything in that course that was inexpedient and190 repulsive. Was he to be silent on opinions which he knew to have been Mr. Hunter\'s, and of the moral and scientific advantages of which he had a most matured conviction? That would have been a compromise of his duty. It was a difficult dilemma—a real case of the

    "Incidit in Scyllam qui vult vitare Charybdim."

If he avoided one difficulty, he fell into another. He tried to take a middle course—he argued in support of the opinions he had enunciated, and aided these by additional illustrations; and, in contrasting them with those opinions which were opposed to him, he endeavoured to avoid a personal allusion to individuals, by arguing against a class, which he termed the "band of modern sceptics." Even this was a little Charybdis, perhaps; because it had a sort of name-calling effect, whilst it was not at all essential thus to embody in any one phrase the persons who held opposite opinions.

His position was intensely difficult. It should be recollected that Abernethy had always been a teacher of young men; that he had always taught principles of surgery which he conceived to be deducible from those delivered by Hunter; that he further believed that, to understand Hunter clearly, it was necessary to have a correct notion of the idea Mr. Hunter entertained of "Life;" and lastly, that, in all his Lectures, Abernethy had a constant tendency to consider, and a habit of frequent appeal to, what, under different forms, might be regarded as the moral bearings of any subject which might be under discussion. We readily admit that, usually, in conducting scientific arguments, the alleged moral tendencies of this or that view are more acceptable when reserved to grace a conclusion, than when employed to enforce an argument; yet we think that, now, comparatively few persons would think the discussion of any subject bearing on the physical nature of Man, complete, which omitted the very intimate and demonstrable relations which exist between the moral and the physiological laws.

The point, however, which we wish to impress, is, that Mr. Abernethy, in pleading the moral bearings of Hunter\'s views by191 deductions of his own, was simply following that course which he had been in the habit of doing on most other questions; it was merely part of that plan on which, without the smallest approach at any attempt to intrude religious considerations inappropriately into the discussion of matters ordinarily regarded as secular, he had always inculcated a straightforward, free-from-cant, do-as-you-would-be-done-by tone in his own Lectures. This, while it formed one of their brightest ornaments, was just that without which all lectures must be held as defective, which are addressed to young men about to enter an arduous and responsible profession.

Abernethy stated nothing as facts but which were demonstrably such; and with regard to any hypotheses which he employed in aid of explaining them, he observed those conditions which philosophers agree on as necessary, whether the hypotheses be adopted or otherwise. He did not do even this, but for the very legitimate object of explaining the views of the man on whose labours he was discoursing.

When those views of Mr. Hunter, which had been thus set forth and illustrated, were attacked, he defended them with his characteristic ability; and although we will not undertake to say that the defence contains no single passage that might not as well have been omitted, we are not aware that, from the beginning to the end, it is charged with a single paragraph that does not fall fairly within the limits that the most stringent would prescribe to scientific controversy.

The discussion of abstract principles is generally unprofitable. We think few things more clear than that we know not the intrinsic nature of any abstract principle; and although it would be presumptuous to say we never shall, yet we think it impossible for any reflecting student in any science to avoid perceiving that there are peculiar relations between the laws of nature and the human capacity, which most emphatically suggest that the study of the one is the proper business, and the prescribed limit to the power, of the other.

Still, the poverty of language is such, as regards the expression of natural phenomena, that necessity has obliged us to clothe192 the forces in nature with some attribute sufficiently in conformity with our ideas to enable us to give them an intelligible expression; and, whether we talk of luminous particles, ethereal undulations, electric or magnetic fluids, matter of heat, &c. we apprehend that no one now means more than to convey an intellectually tangible expression, of certain forces in nature, of which he desires to discourse; in order to describe the habitudes they observe, or the laws which they obey. This is all we think it necessary to say on the scientific conduct of the argument by Abernethy.

The public have long since expressed their opinion on Mr. Lawrence\'s Reply and Lectures; and whatever may be regarded as their decision, we have no disposition to............