1874.] 107 [Gray. 



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 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 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, 

 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, Troglodytes niger, published in full in the Jour- 

 nal of this Society, the anatomical part by Prof. Wyman. 

 Two other papers- of that early year, on the Anatomy of two 

 Mollusca, Tebennophorus carolinensis and Glandina 'trun- 

 cata, 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 pencil, which characterize all his work, 

 both of research and instruction. 



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 Silliman's Journal in October, 1843, was impor- 

 tant and timely. In it he demonstrated that the labyrinthine 

 structure of the teeth, considered at the time to be peculiar 



