JEFFRIES WYMAN. 



499 



lie was, also, one of the original members of the American Asso- 

 ciation for the Advancement of Science, and its first Treasurer, having 

 already acted as an officer of the older Association of Geologists and 

 Naturalists. In 1857 he was elected President of the Association for 

 the meeting to be held in Baltimore the following year, but he was 

 not able to be present at that meeting. 



On the establishment of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, he 

 was appointed one of the fliculty and continued iu the position until 

 the close of his life, which occurred soon after the death of the 

 founder of the great museum, for whose unrivalled talents and 

 enthusiastic nature, so directly the opposite of his own retiring dis- 

 position, Wyman always expressed the highest esteem. That his 

 appreciation of Agassiz was thorough and free from all envy, which, 

 perhaps, many another less noble and generous nature would have fflt 

 on seeing aid lavished by liberal hands on a sister museum when his 

 own was retarded for the total want of means, is well exemplilied by 

 a remark he made soon after the death of the lamented Agassiz. 

 After speaking in relation to the position which Agassiz had taken on 

 the all-absorbing questions of natural selection and evolution, he uttered 

 the following sentence in his usual simple, but earnest manner: " Well, 

 say what we will as to his views, right or wrong, there is no mistake 

 about it, Airassiz was head and shoulders above us all." 



While attending to bis duties in the college, and teaching the several 

 private students who were so fortunate as to gain admission to his 

 laboratory, he continued his researches, and, from time to time, com- 

 municated the results of his labors to the Natural History Society 

 and to the Academy. Several of his papers were printed in the 

 American Journal of Science and Art, and one of his most extended, 

 that on the nervous system of Rana fipiens, was published in 1852 

 by the Smithsonian Institution in its quarto memoirs. The Journal 

 and Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History contain 

 many valuable papers communicated by him, among the most im- 

 portant of which is that on the Gorilla, printed in 1847, and followed 

 by several papers in which the resemblances and differences between 

 man and the ape are discussed with that care which is so apparent in 

 all that he wrote. Another of his series of observations was first 

 made known by his paper on the anatomy of the blind fish, published 

 in 18-43 ; and to this subject, as to that of the anatomy of the apes, 

 he returned as opportunities offered. The most important of the 

 communications made to the Academy are those on the '• Develop- 

 ment of the Skate," in 1804, and published in the Memoirs; and that 



