74 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ciety in 1844, and in the following year he obtained a lectureship at 

 the London Hospital. A lectureship in geology was bestowed on him, 

 by the trustees of the British Museum, in "1847, and in the same year 

 he became one of the examiners of the London University. He also 

 succeeded Dr. Forbes as editor of the British and Foreign Medical He- 

 view, to which he had been a constant contributor for years, and which 

 was now amalgamated with the Medico- Chirurgical Review, under the 

 title British and Foreign Medico- Chirurgical Meview. Besides edi- 

 torial supervision, he continued to contribute articles to this periodi- 

 cal, on a wide range of subjects. In 1849 he was appointed Professor 

 of Medical Jurisprudence at University College, a post which he held 

 for ten years. 



Some six or eight years had already elapsed from the time when 

 Mr. Grove first promulgated his views on the now well-known doc- 

 trine of the " Correlation of Physical Forces." As indicated by the 

 title of his treatise, Mr. Grove did not attempt to show the equivalence 

 of the so-called "vital force" with the physical forces ; but confined 

 himself to proving the mutual convertibility of the physical forces 

 motion, heat, electricity, light, magnetism, etc. In a memoir commu- 

 nicated to the Royal Society in 1850, Dr. Carpenter carried the argu- 

 ment further; he attempted to bring the "vital force" also within 

 the generalization, proving that it has its origin in solar light and 

 heat, and not, as is commonly believed, in a power inherent in the 

 germ. 



The reader will form an idea of the success of Dr. Carpenter's two 

 principal, works from the fact that, as early as in 1S51, a third edition 

 of the " Comparative Physiology," and a fourth of the " Human Physi- 

 ology," were called for. Very high authorities have expressed their 

 appreciation of these works, and the debt which recent physiology 

 owes to them. Among these authorities may be mentioned Sir Benja- 

 min Brodie, who, in his presidential address at the annual meeting of 

 the Royal Society in 1861, said that Dr. Carpenter's works "have 

 served, more perhaps than any others of their time, to spread the 

 knowledge of those sciences, and promote their study among a large 

 class of readers;" and that, "while they admirably fulfil their pur- 

 pose as systematic expositions of the current state of knowledge on 

 the subjects which they comprehend, they afford evidence throughout 

 of much depth and extent of original thought on some of the great 

 questions of physiology." The field where, perhaps, Dr. Carpenter 

 has been most successful, is that border-land between the physical and 

 the psychical, between matter and mind the nervous system and its 

 functions. He has also given his thoughts on another topic of present 

 interest, in an article on the tl Varieties of the Human Race ; " where 

 he argues strongly on physiological and psychological grounds for the 

 specific unity of mankind. 



In 1852 Dr. Carpenter relinquished the editorship of the Medico- 



