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 Zoology, 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 of Dr. "Wy man'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 1843, 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 



