LIN'NEAN SOCIETY OF LOJTDON. 67 



Sir William Heney Plower, K.C.B., D.C.L., F.E.S., was born 

 on 30th November, 1831, at Stratford-on-Avon, aad educated at 

 private schools and University College, London, wbere he gained 

 a gold medal in Anatomy and Physiology, and the silver one in 

 Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. He took his M.B. in 1851, 

 and became a Member of the Eoyal College of Surgeons in the 

 same year. After a Continental tour he entered tlie Army as an 

 Assistant-Surgeon in the 63rd Poot Eegiment, and saw service in 

 the Crimea, receiving the Medal with four clasps and the Turkish 

 medal. Eeturning to London, he was in 1859 appointed Assistant- 

 Surgeon and Demonstrator of Anatomy in the Middlesex Hospital, 

 and while there he produced his first anatomical work entitled 

 ' Diagrams of the Xerves of the Human Body.' Two surgical 

 papers followed, and then his ' Xotes on the Galago ' and ' On 

 the Posterior Lobes of the Cerebrum of the Quadrumaua ' — the 

 two memoirs which marked his choice of comparative anatomy as 

 his life's work. In 1861 he was appointed Conservator of the 

 Museum of the Poyal College of Surgeons, on the death of 

 Mr. John Quekett ; and his 23 years' tenure of office marked the 

 most active portion of his life, during \^hich he produced memoir 

 after memoir, based for the most part upon work done in the 

 arrangement and extension of the Mammalian Collection, which 

 under his care became unsui-passed. 



Flower in 1870 succeeded Huxley as Huuterian Professor of 

 Comparative Anatomy in this College ; and during the fourteen 

 years he continued in office, his Lectures, which were a constant 

 attraction, were to a large extent indicative of the working of his 

 mind in the development of the resources of the great Collection of 

 which he had charge, already rendered classic by the labours of John 

 Hunter and P. Owen. His papers upon Mammalian Anatomy, 

 conspicuously those on the Dentition of the Marsupialia, on the 

 Brain of the Primates, and on the Classification of the Carnivora, 

 are now famous ; and it was in the course of this work that he 

 produced the long series of memoirs on the Cetacean Skeleton, 

 which will ever remain a lasting monument to his labours and the 

 foremost works of reference upon the subject. In conjunction with 

 those of Turner, they constitute the writings of English zoologists 

 the central court of appeal in Cetology. He was not, however, 

 neglectful of other groups of animals, for while he published 

 papers on the anatomy of the Bustard, Cassowary, and Hornbill, 

 he in his Museum work did not forsake even the lower Inverte- 

 brata. But he was never very sympathetic with either these or 

 with microscopic work. Conspicuous among his Lectures were 

 those of 1880 on the ' Comparative Anatomy of Man,' in which 

 he dealt with the skulls of certain little-known and extinct races. 

 A leading result of his curatorial work was his Catalogue of this 

 date, on Man's Osteology, which was the embodiment of years 

 of labour, the results of which were from time to time made 

 known in lectures and addresses, and in ]mrt embodied in subse- 

 quent communications made to the British Association and the 



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