548 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the investigations on the organization of marine and inferior animals 

 that were going on in our country. We had among us, in the course 

 of a few years, the greater portion of the zoologists, anatomists, and 

 physiologists of the world. The first door at which they knocked was 

 yours. At that fortunate period for science, your health was consid- 

 ered quite delicate. It has since appeared to all that your love for sci- 

 ence gave you the strength which nature had refused you." 



To these investigations succeeded his studies on the structure and 

 classification of recent and fossil Polyps, and his monograph on Brit- 

 ish fossil corals, both 'prepared in connection with J. Haime (1848 to 

 1852), and in 1851 a,series of memoirs on the morphology and classifi- 

 cation of the Crustaceans (since collected in a volume of " Carcino- 

 logical Miscellanies "). His " General Tendencies of Nature," which 

 appeared in the same year, was on a subject which had occupied him 

 for a long time ; for his first publications on the vitality of the differ- 

 ent parts of the aniAal organism, and on the law of the perfection- 

 ment of animated beings by the division of physiological labor, date 

 from 1826, and were published in the " Classical Dictionary of Nat- 

 ural History." A monograph on the fossil Polyps of the Palaeozoic 

 formations, published also in 1851 in co-operation with M. J. Haime,, 

 forms nearly the whole of the fifth volume of the " Archives of the 

 Museum." Between 1857 and 1860 he published his " Natural His- 

 tory of the Corals Proper," and in 1858 a large volume on the " Recent 

 Progress of. Zoology in France." 



The crowning work of his life, the " Lessons on the Comparative 

 Anatomy and Physiology of Man and Animals," was begun in 1857, 

 and was completed on the publication of the fourteenth volume, of 

 five hundred pages, in 1880. This work includes all the lectures which 

 were delivered by the author at the Museum of Natural History dur- 

 ing the twenty-three years that it was in preparation. Professor 

 Michael Foster said of this work, the " beautiful legacy," as Bernard 

 has called it, of the venerable author, reviewing the ninth volume in 

 1870, in " Nature " : "At a time when a ' differentiation ' of study is 

 carried to such an extent that many physiologists know very little 

 about other animals than frogs, rabbits, dogs, and men, and many 

 zoologists have a very meager acquaintance with the results of experi- 

 mental physiology, such a work as this, which skillfully weaves to- 

 gether all the main facts of animal biology, is most wholesome read- 

 ing." 



M. Milne-Edwards was nominated an officer of the Lesrion of 

 Honor in 1847, and a commander in the same order in 1861. He re- 

 ceived the Copley medal of the British Royal Society in 1856, and the 

 Boerhaave medal of the Scientific Society of the Netherlands in 1880, 

 being the first person upon whom that medal had been conferred. 



M. de Quatrefages, addressing the subject of this sketch on the 

 occasion of the presentation of the medal to him in 1881, said : " We 



