214 Royal Society. 



The Royal Medal for the present year, which the Council had 

 proposed to give to the most important paper in Animal Physiology 

 communicated to the Royal Society within the last three years, is 

 awarded to George Newport, Esq., for his series of investigations 

 on the Anatomy and Physiology of Insects, contained in his two pa- 

 pers published in the Philosophical Transactions within that pe- 

 riod. 



Mr. Newport, to whom the Society was indebted in 1 832 for a 

 very valuable and elaborate anatomical investigation of the nervous 

 system of the Sphinx ligustri of Linnaeus, and of the successive 

 changes which that insect undergoes during the state of larva, and the 

 earlier stages of the pupa state, published in the Philosophical 

 Transactions of that year, has since prosecuted this arduous and la- 

 borious train of inquiry, under circumstances of peculiar difficulty, 

 with extraordinary zeal and indefatigable perseverance. Within the 

 period of the last three years he has enriched the Transactions with 

 two papers, in the first of which, read to the Society in June 1834, 

 he has extended his researches into the structure and arrangement of 

 the different portions of the nervous system of the same insect, fol- 

 lowing their successive changes through the remaining stages of de- 

 velopment to the completion of the imago, or perfect state. He 

 devotes particular attention to the study of the periods at which 

 those several changes occur; for he has found that they vary consi- 

 derably in the rapidity of their progress at different epochs, according 

 as the vital powers are called into action by external influences, or 

 as they become exhausted by their efforts in effecting the growth, or 

 modifying the form of different systems of organs. The labours of 

 Mr. Newport have determined, with great exactness, those periods, 

 which had not before been ascertained. 



Among the numerous original observations of Mr. Newport on the 

 arrangement and connexions of the several parts of the nervous 

 system, the description he gives of the origin and distribution of the 

 visceral nerve, which he shows to be analogous to the pneumo- 

 gastric nerve of vertebrated animals, and also of the system of nerves 

 corresponding to those which have been considered as peculiarly 

 subservient to the supply of the respiratory organs, are particularly 

 deserving of notice. In the course of this investigation many new 

 and important Aicts are brought to light, which had escaped the 

 observation of Lyonet, Miiller, Brandt and Straus-Durkheim. Mr. 

 Newport has also traced a remarkable analogy in the origin and dis- 

 tribution of the two distinct classes of nerves, the one subservient 

 to sensation, and the other to volition, belonging to insects, with 

 those belonging to vertebrated animals, and has thus given greater 

 extension to our views of the uniformity existing in the plans of 

 animal organization than we before possessed, and which are thus 

 made to comprehend the more minute, as well as the larger tribes 

 of the animal creation. 



In a memoir on the Respiration of Insects, more recently commu- 

 nicated to the Society, and of which, at its last meeting in June, the 

 title only could be announced, Mr. Newport has, with great diligence 



