26 MEMORIAL SKETCH. 



the University regulations enabled him to graduate by three 

 months' additional residence. Once more on the students' 

 bench, in the winter of 1839, he had the pleasure of hearing 

 his book quoted in class with high approval by the Professor. 

 There, moreover, he renewed old friendships, and took his 

 place again at the meetings of the Royal Medical Society, 

 to which he read the dissertation afterwards sent in for his 

 degree of Doctor of Medicine. He chose for his subject 

 " The Physiological Inferences to be deduced from the 

 Structure of the Nervous System of Invertebrated Ani- 

 mals." Like his earlier productions, this was based less upon 

 results of original anatomical or experimental inquiry, than 

 upon facts already determined. But he gave a fresh inter- 

 pretation of these facts : he .showed that the doctrines 

 hitherto taught by Dr. Grant and Mr. Newport, for example, 

 were inconsistent with them ; and he proceeded to apply to 

 the nervous systems of articulated and molluscous animals 

 the principles of reflex action, of which he had already else- 

 where discussed the higher forms. His views were at once 

 adopted by Professor Owen and other eminent physiolo- 

 gists. Mr. Newport, indeed, at first contested them, but 

 subsequent inquiry convinced him of the correctness of 

 his critic's position, which he frankly adopted in a Memoir 

 published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1843. 



From Edinburgh, Dr. W. B. Carpenter returned to 

 Bristol, to resume his lectures at the Medical School, and 

 to make another effort to acquire a practice. He found 

 himself among a circle of friends whose varied tastes and 

 powers in some degree compensated him for the loss of the 

 intellectual stimulus of the northern University. To Dr. 

 Prichard, the author of the well-known " Physical History 

 of Mankind," who resided in the old Elizabethan mansion 

 known as the Red Lodge,* he looked up with almost filial 



* Afterwards converted by Mary Carpenter into a Reformatory for Girls. 



