THE INCORPORATORS 1 99 



health, he accomplished much for the museum. He was obliged, 

 however, to spend his winters in Florida, and once or twice he 

 visited Europe for the purpose of recuperating. Thus he con- 

 tinued until the summer of 1874 when he unfortunately under- 

 took an unusual amount of work in the museum, enough indeed 

 to overtax the strength of a man physically sound. In the fall 

 of the same year he went to the White Mountains for a short rest, 

 but he was unable to regain his energies and died on September 

 4, quite suddenly, while in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Dr. 

 Wyman's lack of physical vigor was probably the prime rea- 

 son why he was not a voluminous writer. His papers though 

 numerous are generally brief. He often summarized in a few 

 pages the conclusions to which he had come after months, per- 

 haps, of painstaking experiments. He wrote on many different 

 zoological subjects, and his published papers relate to numerous 

 classes of animals both recent and fossil, and to physiology and 

 teratology, as well as to anatomy. 



One of the most important and best known of his scientific 

 papers is that on the Gorilla, of which he was the joint author 

 with Dr. Savage, who sent him specimens for study. This great 

 anthropoid ape was here first described under the name of 

 Troglodytes gorilla, and Dr. Wyman gave a full account of the 

 skeleton. It was this article which helped to establish his reputa- 

 tion among comparative anatomists. He also published an 

 elaborate essay on the anatomy of the blind fish of the Mammoth 

 Cave, another on the homology of limbs, and a third on the rela- 

 tionship between vertebrates and invertebrates, based on a study 

 of the nervous system of the frog. His most original essay in 

 physiology was one relating to experiments on vibrating cilia, 

 published in 1871. 



His anthropological writings were marked by care, ingenuity, 

 judiciousness and extensive knowledge, and gave him rank 

 among the principal anthropologists of his day. Besides the 

 work on shell-heaps already referred to, he made numerous 

 studies of human crania. 



