JEFFRIES WYMAN. 385 
fied, only when the increasing delicacy of his health, to which 
night exposure was prejudicial, made it unsafe for him any 
longer to undertake its duties. The record shows that he has 
made here one hundred and five scientific communications, 
several of them very important papers, every one of some posi- 
tive value; for you all know that Professor Wyman never 
spoke or wrote except to a direct purpose, and because there 
was something which it was worth while to communicate. He 
bore his part also in the American Academy of Arts and Sci- 
ences, of which he was a Fellow from the year 1843, and for 
many years a councilor. To it he made a good number of 
communications ; among them one of the longest and ablest 
of his memoirs. 
Then he was from the first a member of the faculty of the 
Museum of Comparative Zodlogy, where his services and his 
advice were highly valued. He was chosen president of the 
American Association for the Advancement of Science for the 
year 1857, but did not assume the duties of the office. 
Some notice —brief and cursory though it must be — of 
such portion 6f Dr. Wyman’s scientific work as is recorded 
in his published papers, should form a part of this account of 
his life. 
His earliest publication, so far as we know, was an article 
in the “‘ Boston Medical and Surgical Journal,” in 1837, signed 
only with the initials of his name. It is upon “ The indis- 
tinctness of images formed from oblique rays of light,” and 
the cause of it. The handling of the subject is as character- 
istic as that of any later paper. In January, 1841, we find 
his first recorded communication of this society, “ On the 
Cranium of a Seal.” The first to the American Academy is 
the account of his dissection of the electrical organs of a new 
species of Torpedo, in 1848, part of a paper by his friend 
Dr. Storer, published in Silliman’s Journal. In the course of 
that year, eleven communications were made to our society, 
beside the annual address, which he delivered on the 17th of 
May. The most important of these was the memoir, by Dr. 
Savage and himself, on the Black Orang or Chimpanzee of 
Africa, Troglodytes niger, published in full in the Journal of 
