BOSTON SOCIETY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 171 



Harvard College in 1829, the year in which Josiah Quincy took the presidency, and was 

 graduated in 1833, in a class of fifty-six, six of whom became professors in the University. 

 He was not remarkable for general scholarship, but was fond of chemistry, and his prefer- 

 ence for anatomical studies was already developed. Some of his class-mates remember 

 the interest which was excited among them by a skeleton which he made of a mammoth 

 bull-frog from Fresh Pond, probably one which is still preserved in his museum of com- 

 parative anatomy. His skill and taste in drawing, which he turned to such excellent 

 account in his investigations and in the lecture room, as well as his habit of close obser- 

 vation of natural objects met with in his strolls, were manifested even in boyhood. 



An attack of pneumonia during his senior year in college caused much anxiety, and 

 perhaps laid the foundation of the pulmonary aflfection which burdened and finally short- 

 ened his life. To recover from the effects of the attack, and to guard against its return, 

 he made in the winter of 1833-34, the first of those pilgrimages to the coast of the 

 Southern States, which in later years were so often repeated. Returning with strength 

 renewed in the course of the following spring, he began the study of medicine under 

 Dr. John C. Dalton, who had succeeded to his father's practice at Chelmsford, but who 

 soon removed to the adjacent and thriving town of Lowell. Here, and witli his fiither at 

 the McLean Asylum, and at the Medical College in Boston, he passed two years of profits 

 able study. At the commencement of the third year he was elected house-student in the 

 Medical Department, at the Massachusetts General Hospital, — then under the charge of 

 Doctors James Jackson, John Ware and Walter Channing — a responsible position, not 

 only most advantageous for the study of disease, but well adapted to sharpen a young 

 man's power of observation. 



In 1837, after receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine, he cast about among the 

 larger country towns for a field in which to practice his profession. Fortunately for 

 science he found no opening to his mind ; so he took an office in- Boston, on Washington 

 Street, and accepted the honorable, but far from lucrative post of Demonstrator of Anat- 

 omy under Dr. John C. Warren, the Hersey Professor. His means were very slender, 

 and his life abstemious to the verge of privation; for he was unwilling to burden his 

 father, who, indeed, had done all he could in providing for the education of two sons. It 

 may be interesting to know that, to eke out his subsistence, he became at this time a 

 member of the Boston Fire Department, under an aj)pointnient of Samuel A. Eliot, 

 Mayor, dated Sept. 1st, 1838. He was assigned to Engine No. 18. The rule was that the 

 first-comer to the engine house should bear the lantern, and be absolved from other work. 

 Wyman lived near by, and his promptitude generally saved him from all severer labor 

 than that of enlightening his company. 



The turning point in his life, i. e., an opportunity which he could seize of devoting it to 

 science, came when Mr. John A. Lowell offered him the curatorship of the Lowell Insti- 

 tute, just brought into operation, and a course of lectures in it. He delivered his course 

 of twelve lectures upon Comparative Anatomy and Physiology in the winter of 1840-41 ; 

 and with the money earned by this first essay in instructing others, he went to Europe to 

 seek further instruction for himself. He reached Paris in May, 1841, and gave his time at 

 once to Human Anatomy at the School of Medicine, and Comparative Anatomy and Nat- 

 ural History at the Garden of Plants, attending the lectures of Floiirens, Majendie, and 



