534 
brilliant career of more than fifty years. In 1784, his celebrated 
lecture on the eyes of the White Negro* awakened an intense in- 
terest throughout the scientific world, and, together with his Inau- 
gural Essay upon the native varieties of the human race, became the 
nucleus of his future works on the Natural History of Man. 
In 1790 appeared the first Decad of his collection of skulls of dif- 
ferent nations, a subject which continued among the most favourite 
themes of his study, from its first commencement in his Inaugural 
Dissertation, to his last essay upon a Macrocephalus in 1833. . 
On the celebration of the Jubilee of his Doctoriat, Sept. 19th, 
1825, the company of the most distinguished naturalists and medi- 
cal practitioners of Germany then assembled at Gottingen resolved, 
on the suggestion of Rudolfi, to testify their gratitude for the be- 
nefits they had individually received from his oral instructions and 
published works, and to perpetuate the memory of this remarkable 
assembly, by the foundation of a travelling Fellowship in honour of 
Blumenbach, and by a medalt, bearing on its obverse three skulls 
of the European, Ethiopic and Mongolian races. 
The expressions of piety, gratitude, and affection which are re- 
corded in the elder Sommering’s celebrated Inaugural Dissertation 
give utterance to feelings, in which the pupils collected around him 
during more than half a century have, without exception, partici- 
pated. 
He was the great precursor of Cuvier in comparative anatomy, 
and was the first to demonstrate the value of this science in its re- 
lation to pathology, and to convince mankind of the truth of the 
observation of Haller—that physiology has been more illustrated 
by comparative anatomy than by the dissection of the human body, 
so that henceforth this subject must become an essential part of 
medical education. 
The present is not the fit occasion to enter into a discussion of 
the unrivalled merits of his lectures on pathology, comparative 
anatomy, natural history, and physiology; nor to set forth the 
number and nature of his multifarious publications on these sub- 
jects, and also on archeology, literature, and the fine arts, which, 
during a period of sixty years, enriched the Commentaries of the 
Royal Society of Gottingen, and the medical, literary and philo- 
sophical periodicals of Germany ; nor does the time permit me to 
enter on an analysis of his lucid and instructive Manuals, which 
were soon translated into foreign languages, and became the text- 
book of teachers of comparative anatomy and physiology through- 
out Europe; I shall rather call your attention to his acute percep- 
tion of the value of organic remains in relation to geology, as 
affording evidence of past changes and revolutions which have af- 
fected the surface of the globe. 
In his two celebrated Essays on the Archeology of the Earth, 1801 - 
* De oculis Leucaethiopum et iridis motu. Soc. R. Gott., v. vii. p. 29— 
62. ’ 
{ With the follewing inscription, ‘‘ Nature Interpreti, Ossa Loqui Ju- 
benti, Physiophili Germanici, 19 Sept. 1825.” : 
