88 Jeffries Wyman. 
His earliest publication, so faras 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 indistinctness of 
images formed from oblique rays of light,” and the cause of it. 
The handling of the subject is as characteristic as that of any 
later paper. In January, 1841, we find his first recorded com- 
munication to 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 1848, 
part of a paper by his friend Dr. Storer, published in the 
American Journal of Science. In the course of that year, 
eleven communications were.made to our society, besides 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, Troglo- 
dytes niger, published in full in the Journal of this society, the 
anatomical part by Professor Wyman. ‘T'wo other papers of 
that early year, on the Anatomy of two Mollusca, Tehennophorus 
Carolinensis and Glandina truncata, published in the fourth 
volume of the society's Journal, each with a copper plate, are 
noteworthy, as showing that he possessed from the first that 
happy faculty of clear, terse, and closely relevant exposition, 
and that skill and neatness of illustration with his pene! 
which characterize all his work, both of research and instruc- 
tion. 
Another paper of that year, ‘On the microscopic structure of 
the teeth of the Lepidostei, and their analogies with those of the — 
Labyrinthodonts,” read to this society in August, and published — 
in this Journal in October, 1848, was important and timely. 
In it he demonstrated that the labyrinthine structure of the 
teeth, considered at the time to be peculiar to certain sauroid 
reptiles, equally belonged to the gar-fishes, and consequently 
that many fossil teeth which had been referred by the evidence — 
of this character alone to a group of reptiles founded upon this — 
peculiarity, might as well belong to ancient sauroid fishes. | 
Although not of any importance now to remember, I may _ 
here mention his report to this society on the Hydrarchos Silly 
mant of Koch, a factitious Saurian of huge length, successfully 
exhibited in New York and elsewhere under high auspices, a! 
I think also in Germany, but which Dr. Wyman expose at 
sight, showing that it was made up of an indefinite numbet 
of various cetacean vertebrae, belonging to many individu 1 
which (as was afterward ascertained) were collected from several — 
localities. : 
But the memoir by which Professor Wyman assured bis 
position among the higher comparative anatomists was that 
communicated to and published by this society in the samme? 
