xlvi PROCEEDINGS OF THE 
venerated M. Duméril, who died on the 14th of August, 1860, after 
a short illness, at the advanced age of 86, universally honoured 
and beloved. 
Andre-Marie-Constant Duméril, Member of the Institute and 
Commander in the Legion of Honour, was born at Amiens in the 
year 1774. At an early age he devoted himself to the study of 
Medicine, and so soon distinguished himself, that in 1798, when 
only 19, he was appointed Préyot d’ Anatomie at Rouen. In 1798 
he was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Medicine in the Uni- 
versity of Paris, and was nominated Chef des Travaux Anatomiques 
in that Capital, an office for which he had competed successfully 
with Dupuytren. In 1801 he was raised to the chair of Anatomy 
at the Faculty of Medicine, which in 1822 he resigned for that 
of Physiology, to be in turn exchanged, in 1830, for that of 
internal Pathology, which he held till his death. In the early part 
of his career he appears to have been also actively engaged in the 
practice of Medicine, and in 1804 was appointed by the Emperor 
Napoleon, in company with M. Desgenettes, on a mission to study 
the yellow fever in the South of Spain,—a dangerous duty, to which 
he devoted himself with the zeal and energy which he displayed 
on all occasions and on all subjects. 
But notwithstanding these professional occupations, M. Duméril’s 
attention was-from the first principally directed towards zoolo- 
gical science, to various departments of which his chief works alone 
belong. 
In 1800, under the direction of Cuvier, he assisted in the editing 
of the first two volumes of the ‘ Legons d’ Anatomie Comparée’ of 
that great anatomist, who never failed on all occasions to acknow- 
ledge the assistance he had derived from his able and industrious 
coadjutor ; by whom also he was succeeded in the chair of Natural 
History in the Ecole Centrale of the Panthéon*. 
In 1802 he was deputed by M. de Lacépéde to deliver the lectures 
on Herpetology and Ichthyology at the Jardin des Plantes, a 
mission which M. Duméril continued to fulfil for more than fifty 
years, at first as the substitute for M. de Lacépéde, and afterwards 
as titular Professor of those subjects. To his zeal and industry 
in this office, not only is the Museum indebted for the creation 
both of the best collection of objects belonging to Herpetology 
* Tn a notice of M. Duméril’s works, it should not be omitted that he was 
perhaps the first to perceive the analogy of structure which exists between the 
vertebree and the bones of the cranium ; a theory which for the last forty years 
has exercised the ingenuity of so many. 
