304 Olituary Notices. 



of an enthusiastic educator. Though pre-eminently a 

 specialist, he never lost his zest for polite literature and 

 art, along with the pressing public questions of the day. 

 Mary Carpenter could still recuperate her energies, fagged 

 with reformatory worries, in the serene fields of natural 

 science ; and so "William kept an even-balanced mind by 

 alternating university business details with excursions into 

 microscopy or the like. But above all there stood manifest 

 in his life turmoil a puritanic devotion to duty, as well as 

 reverence for the written "Word of God. The intellectual 

 society of Bristol had a powerful influence in the develop- 

 ment of the young scientist. Meeting such celebrities as 

 Conybeare, De la Beche, and Prichard, who often visited his 

 father's house on matters pertaining to the then young 

 Literary and Philosophical Society of the city, or Sedgwick, 

 Buckland, and Philips, during a British Association meeting 

 in its precincts, the spark of enthusiasm was kindled not to 

 be put out. Besides, Frederick Denison Maurice, as well 

 as James Martiueau, were there also to represent mental 

 philosophy. In the latter period of his Bristol novitiate, 

 Carpenter became apprentice to Mr Estlin, a medical 

 j)ractitioner in the city, who shortly after sent him as 

 companion to a patient on a West Indian voyage. On 

 returning to Britain, Carpenter joined the medical classes of 

 University College, London, at the age of twenty, in 1833. 

 On passing the examinations of the Eoyal College of 

 Surgeons and the Apothecaries Society in 1835, he trans- 

 ferred his medical studies to Edinburgh in the following 

 year. About this time he began to give popular scientfiic 

 lectures ; but, according to Dr Shapter, who heard him in 

 1835 at Exeter, the future Gilchrist lecturer had not yet 

 come to his great power of attracting popular audiences. 

 The time of Carpenter's arrival in Edinburgh marked 

 something like an epoch in the fortunes of its medical 

 school ; for the old practitioners, so well commemorated in 

 the autobiography of Sir Eobert Christison, were being 

 replaced b}' a newer race of teachers, of which, indeed, the 

 subject of this notice was amongst the last representatives. 

 In this, our jubilee year, let us recall 1836, when John 

 Percy, our greatest English metallurgist, and "W. B. 

 Carpenter, but lately facile princeps of our physiologists, 



