\ 
1891.] Scientific News. 409 
In the meantime, however, much of his leisure had been passed in a 
wholesale drug store near his home. His time here was so well spent 
that the proprietor did not hesitate, when an opportunity offered, to 
recommend him as competent to take temporary charge of a retail 
drug store belonging to a customer. He was encouraged by his success 
in filling the trust thus reposed in him to study the properties and art 
of compounding drugs as a profession. His study of nature, while 
thus occupied, had not been neglected. To botany and mineralogy 
he had added comparative anatomy, his first practical studies in that 
branch having been made on a barn-door fowl and a common earth- 
worm. So absorbed did he become in his anatomical studies that, at 
the suggestion of his mother and with the consent of his father, he 
gave up all intention of becoming either artist or apothecary, and 
resolved to devote himself to that profession which would afford him 
the best opportunity for pursuing those studies from which it was now 
evident he could not easily withdraw himself. In the autumn of 1840, 
therefore, he began the study of medicine, devoting his first year to 
practical anatomy. 
Having entered the office of Dr. Paul B. Goddard, he attended . 
three full courses of lectures in the University of Pennsylvania, pre- 
sented a thesis on ‘‘The Comparative Anatomy of the Eye of Verte- 
brated Animals,” and graduated as doctor of medicine in the spring 
of 1844. Immediately after receiving his degree his first work in con- 
“nection with the university was as assistant in the chemical laboratories 
of Drs, Hare and James B. Rogers. He began the practice of medicine 
in the fall of 1844, and continued it for two years, when he resolved 
to devote himself entirely to teaching. He -was elected Professor of 
Anatomy in the University of Pennsylvania in 1853. In 1871 he was 
appointed Professor of Natural History in Swarthmore College. In 
1845 he was elected a member of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural 
Sciences, and in 1846 the chairman of its board of curators. In 1882 
he. became its president. 
Dr. Leidy’s work covered a wide range of subjects. He was a good 
mineralogist, botanist, and zoologist. His original work was done in 
$ logy and in the paleontology of the Vertebrata. He first deter- 
mined the identity of the Zrichina spiralis of man with that of the hog, 
and discovered many new forms of Entozoa. His early researches into 
the anatomy of insects and of other invertebrates are well known. His 
later work was in the field of vertebrate paleontology, of which science 
in America he laid the foundations. His most important work outside 
of this field is his Monograph of the Fresh-Water Rhizopoda of North 
