310 Linnean Society. [May 24, 



still, however, continuing to devote the whole of his leisure time to the 

 study of nature, and especially of Insect-physiology. In 1 832 appeared 

 his first contribution to the ' Philosophical Transactions,' consisting 

 of a memoir " On the Nervous System of the Sphinx Ligustri, and 

 the changes which it undergoes during a part of the Metamorphoses 

 of the Insect." For this paper, prepared under circumstances of 

 great disadvantage, and with very imperfect means of observation, 

 he obtained the Royal Medal ; and this success stimulated him to 

 renewed exertions in a career in which he became greatly distin- 

 guished. After becoming a Member of the College of Surgeons in 

 1835, he was appointed, through the influence of Dr. (now Sir John) 

 Forbes, House- Surgeon to the Chichester Infirmary, on quitting 

 which he entered into general practice at the West-End of London ; 

 but his heart was wholly in his scientific pursuits, and after a few 

 years he resigned the practice of his profession, and depended almost 

 entirely on a pension of £100 a year from the Civil List. He became 

 a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1846, and of the Linnean in 1847 ; 

 and his time was constantly occupied in researches into the more 

 abstruse points of Animal Anatomy and Physiology, the results of 

 which he communicated chiefly in papers read before those Societies, 

 and before the Entomological Society, of which he was for two years 

 (1844-1845) President. In his researches he was peculiarly re- 

 markable for the sagacity with which he planned his course of ob- 

 servations, the extreme neatness and ingenuity of his contrivances, 

 his ready manipulation, the minuteness of his dissections, and an 

 acquired dexterity in drawing either with the right hand or with the 

 left, which gave him great advantages in microscopical delineations. 

 As an observer it is astonishing how much he accomplished in his 

 earlier days with optical means of a very imperfect kind, and how 

 little he found to correct in these observations when supplied with 

 the best modern instruments. By these, however, he was enabled 

 to enlarge the field of his observations, and to make great advances 

 towards the solution of various problems of high physiological in- 

 terest, more especially in relation to the reproduction of lost parts, 

 and the impregnation and development of the ovum in vertebrated 

 animals. It was while engaged in searching in the marshy grounds 

 near Shepherd's Bush for his annual supply of frogs and other am- 

 phibious animals, with a view to the farther prosecution of his re- 

 searches on the last-named subject, that he caught a severe cold, 

 terminating in fever, of the eff^ects of which he died at his residence 

 in Cambridge Street, on the 7th of last month, and in the fifty-second 

 year of his age. The following is a list of his papers in the Philo- 



