Ixxu Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 
reason, he took a house—“'The Granhams ”—at the foot of the chalk hills 
known as the Gogmagogs, nearly four miles from Cambridge, and later, in 
1879, he built for himself a house on the summit of one of these hills on the 
same road as was his former house. In both houses he tried to make a rule 
of spending the afternoon in his garden, often working hard with the spade 
or pick. Excellent as this plan proved in staving off further tubercular 
troubles, it certainly prevented him from obtaining that full weight in the 
councils of the University to which his ability and the services he had | 
rendered the University entitled him, for the morning hours are taken up 
in teaching and the administrative business of the University is of necessity 
undertaken in the afternoon. 
In 1861, he commenced practice with his father at Huntingdon, and 
remained there until 1867, having, in 1863, married Miss Georgina Edmonds, 
daughter of Mr. Cyrus Edmonds. His married life with his first wife was 
short, for she died in 1869, leaving him two young children to look after. 
For six years he remained in practice, but all the time his longing was for 
a scientific career. He had joined the British Association in 1859, and had 
attended the meetings in Oxford, Cambridge, and Dundee, so that when an 
invitation came from his old teacher, Sharpey, to give a course of practical 
physiology at University College, he accepted it, and relinquished medical 
practice for ever. | 
Sharpey’s influence over Foster was very great; in after years he used 
always tosay that in the dark ages of physiology in England, when physiology 
was a mere appendage to human anatomy, the only teaching being in most 
schools a course of lectures given by the professor of human anatomy and 
physiology, it was Sharpey alone who kept the lamp of research alight, he 
alone who recognised that advance in physiological knowledge could come 
only by experimentation, he alone who instilled into the minds of all his 
pupils that lectures by themselves were of little use, but that the student 
must see experiments for himself in order to obtain a real knowledge of the 
subject. ; | 
Besides Sharpey, Foster was much influenced by Claude Bernard, although 
when he was in Paris he does not appear to have attended any of his lectures. 
His appreciation and admiration for him appear in every page of that 
delightful memoir of Claude Bernard written by bim for the ‘ Masters of 
Medicine Series, a book, the dedication of which runs as follows :—“ To the 
physiologists of France, both to those who had the happiness to know Claude 
Bernard in the flesh and to those who, like myself, never saw his face, this 
little sketch is dedicated in the hope that, as he has been to me a father in 
our common science, so may I be allowed to look upon them as brethren.” 
A third great influence in the making of Foster was undoubtedly Huxley. 
He succeeded Huxley as Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal 
Institution in 1869, and in 1870, when Huxley commenced his course of 
elementary biology at South Kensington, he was assisted by Foster, Ray 
Lankester, and Rutherford. Just as Sharpey and Claude Bernard had 
