356 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ing brother. He was prepared for college at Phillips (Exeter) Acad- 

 emy, entered Harvard University in 1829, and was there graduated. 

 During his last year in college he had an attack of pneumonia, which 

 nearly proved fatal ; this doubtless predisposed him to the pulmonary 

 weakness from which he suffered during the latter part of his life, and 

 from which he died on the 4th of September, 1874, at Bethlehem, New 

 Hampshire. 



Soon after his graduation he entered the Harvard Medical School, 

 and, in 1836, became "house medical student" in the Massachusetts 

 General Hospital. 



In 1837 he received the degree of M. D. His graduation thesis 

 was upon the eye, and accompanied by drawings. It does not appear 

 to have been published, but, in September of the same year, the Bos- 

 ton Medical and Surgical Journal contained a paper by him upon the 

 "Indistinctness of Images formed by Oblique Rays of Light." Soon 

 afterward he became Demonstrator of Anatomy in the Medical School 

 under Prof. J. C. Warren, whose chair he was destined afterward 

 to fill. 



In 1839 he accepted the curatorshin of the newly-founded Lowell 

 Institute. Two years later he delivered therein his first course of 

 public lectures (of which no report has come under our notice), and 

 with the money so earned went abroad for a year to pursue his medi- 

 cal and scientific studies under the great European masters. He had 

 already, since 1838, published, in the American Journal of Science, 

 several brief papers upon anatomical and physiological matters. 



In 1843 there were published, in the Journal of the Boston Society 

 of Natural History, anatomical descriptions of two gasteropod mol- 

 lusks (Tebennophorus Carolinensis and Glandina truncata). Like- 

 wise a paper on the chimpanzee (Troglodytes niger), in which, with 

 charactei'istic modesty, his account of its organization (though sub- 

 versive of some of Owen's previous conclusions) is subordinated to 

 Dr. Savage's remarks upon its habits and external characters. The 

 same year he was appointed Professor of Anatomy in the Hampton- 

 Sidney Medical College, at Richmond, Virginia. During his four years' 

 stay his contributions to science included some notes upon fossil re- 

 mains of vertebrates, and longer papers upon the blind fish of the 

 Mammoth Cave and the teeth of the gar-pike {Lepidosteus). The 

 latter paper is illustrated by microscopic sections, showing the close 

 resemblance of the gar-pike's teeth to those of the fossil batrachian 

 Jjobyrinthodon. The article closes with the suggestion that some of 

 the separate teeth then referred by Owen to the latter genus might 

 really belong to Lepidostean forms. This paper alone, though little 

 known and never quoted by its author, would serve to show what 

 manner of man was rising in America. 



In 1847, at the age of thirty-three, he was chosen to the Hersey 

 Professorship of Anatomy, at Cambridge. The year of his inaugura- 



