instructive that he was at once invited to give others, and his
reputation as a lecturer was soon established. He was a natural
orator and story-teller, and he combined with these attractive
qualities that of thoroughness and clearness in demonstrations,
and although his lectures were two hours long he made them so
full of interest that his pupils seldom tired of listening. He
believed that he could do greater good to the world by "publicly
teaching his art than by practising it," and even during the last
few days of his life, when he was so weak that his friends
remonstrated against it, he continued his teaching, fainting from
exhaustion at the end of his last lecture, which preceded his
death by only a few days.

For many years it was Hunter's ambition to establish a museum
where the study of anatomy, surgery, and medicine might be
advanced, and in 1765 he asked for a grant of a plot of ground
for this purpose, offering to spend seven thousand pounds on its,
erection besides endowing it with a professorship of anatomy. Not
being able to obtain this grant, however, he built a house, in
which were lecture and dissecting rooms, and his museum. In this
museum were anatomical preparations, coins, minerals, and
natural-history specimens.

Hunter's weakness was his love of controversy and his resentment
of contradiction. This brought him into strained relations with
many of the leading physicians of his time, notably his own
brother John, who himself was probably not entirely free from
blame in the matter. Hunter is said to have excused his own
irritability on the grounds that being an anatomist, and
accustomed to "the passive submission of dead bodies,"