Robert Hunt was born at Devonport, on the 6th of September, 1807, six months after the death of his father, an officer of the Royal Navy, who, together with all the crew of his vessel, was drowned in the Grecian Archipelago. His early education, received partly in his native town, and partly at Penzance, was brief and inadequate, for when only twelve and a half years of age, be was sent to London and placed with a surgeon in practice there. His medical career appears to have been by no means a happy one. He soon contrived, however, to acquire enough of Latin to qualify him for dispensing prescriptions; he gained some knowledge of anatomy by attending Brooke’s lectures; and amid the exacting labours of a Fleet Street dispensary he found occasional leisure hours, that enabled him to profit by the use of a good library to which be had been allowed access. For somewhere about eleven years be continued as a druggist’s assistant, until at last an illness made it needful for him to return for a season to Cornwall. About this time his grandfather’s death put him in possession of a small property on the banks of the River Fowey.