Koyal Society. 43 



M, Vauquelin was born, I apprehend, about the year 1763 : 

 thirty years afterwards he became associated with M. Fourcroy, 

 and he has since ascended through all the honours of science be- 

 stowed in France, and in 1823 his name was inscribed on the Fo- 

 reign List of the Royal Society. His communications to different 

 Societies have been numerous, and we have a separate work on the 

 difficult art of assaying metals with reference to their commercial 

 importance. M. Vauquelin undoubtedly ranked high among the 

 band of natural philosophers who have given in the last fifty years 

 an impulse to science never before experienced, and never expected 

 to occur. 



On delivering the Medals :— 



MR. CHARLES BELL. 



To no department of science has the Royal Society been indebted 

 in nearly so great a degree for eminently distinguished members or 

 for important communications, as to that of Medicine. 



Ouhi; dyeuJiJ^Brpijros ei<riTU} was the inscription affixed to the aca- 

 demy of Plato. — "Let no one without ability, acquirements and 

 industry, enter here" might be inscribed on a School of Medicine. 

 But the man of ability, of acquirement and of industry, once within 

 the walls, finds himself surrounded by so many objects for inquiry, 

 important in themselves and calculated to raise the feelings, on every 

 side, that his exertions are excited and his energies called into 

 action, till all the powers of his mind acquire the habit of applying 

 themselves with full and undivided efforts to whatever subject is 

 presented to their grasp. 



The object to which Mr. Bell has successfully applied the ener- 

 gies of his powerful mind is one preeminently conspicuous in his 

 own profession and in its utility to mankind. Of all the branches 

 of human knowledge, anatomy has experienced the greatest diffi- 

 culties in struggling against passions, prejudices, and superstition. 

 Throughout the Mahometan world I believe the science is un- 

 known. Astronomy, chemistry, general knowledge have been 

 persecuted in dark ages ; but here, and in these times, in the 

 country which gave birth to Harvey three hundred years ago, dif- 

 ficulties are still opposed against the acquirement of this most 

 practical and useful science; so that, unless some remedy is applied, 

 experience must be hereafter acquired by operations on the living 

 subject, instead of on those in which vitality and the sense of pain 

 are no longer to be found. 



From these and from other causes the progress of anatomy has 

 been peculiarly slow. The skeleton, indeed, obtruded itself into 

 notice by so many ways, that osteology grew into a science by 

 efforts of its own. To this, after a considerable interval, was added 

 a knowledge of the muscles, of the digestive and secretory organs, 

 with that branch of the absorbents then named the lacteals. The 

 circulation of the blood, as we all know, was discovered by the 

 great Harvey, whose portrait adorns this room. The nature of 

 respiration could not be developed till modern chemistry had as- 

 certained the nature and the composition of clastic fluids; and the 



G 2 genera 



