William Hunter owned an impressively large number of natural history specimens, originating among both living things (plants and animals) and non-living (see “Ores and Fossils”, in this volume, pp. 398–409). His herbarium (plants) and his collections of insects, shells, and other invertebrates encompassed thousands of items, while he had many hundreds of vertebrate specimens.

William Hunter’s anatomical and pathological collection numbers more than three thousand specimens, making it one of the outstanding assemblages of its kind in the world. Housed in the Museum of Anatomy at the University of Glasgow (which also holds post-Hunter materials), the Hunter specimens—in most cases, still in their eighteenth-century glass jars—remain an...