xii 



doing this he had the inestimable advantage of the assistance and 

 friendship of Professor Rudolphi ; and for nine months he gave the 

 whole of his time with the closest application to the minute and full 

 dissection of the human body, — the only way, as he himself expressed 

 it, in which any one could obtain the knowledge necessary to a com- 

 petent teacher of the subject. 



As already mentioned, Dr. Sharpey made considerable parts of his 

 foreign travels on foot, with his knapsack on his back, picking up 

 acquaintance with fellow travellers as he went, mixing with the 

 natives of the several places he visited, and storing up in his wonder- 

 fully tenacious memory that fund of observation, anecdote, and inci- 

 dent, which always surprised and delighted those who afterwards heard 

 him narrate his travels. 



On his return from the Continent, in the autumn of 1829, he esta- 

 blished himself in Edinburgh, and engaged in microscopic observation 

 and scientific anatomical research ; and, in 1830, as a necessary pre- 

 liminary to his being qualified as a teacher, he obtained the Fellowship 

 of the College of Surgeons, and presented a probationary essay " On 

 the Pathology and Treatment of False Joints" (after fracture) ; a sub- 

 ject which was no doubt suggested by his intimacy with Mr. Syme, to 

 whom the printed essay is inscribed. In the summer of 1831, Dr. 

 Sharpey again spent three months in Berlin, on this occasion being 

 chiefly employed in collecting anatomical preparations and other 

 materials for the illustration of the course of instruction in anatomy 

 which he had in view to deliver in the following winter. This long- 

 cherished object he carried into effect by giving, during the session of 

 1831-32, a course of systematic lectures on anatomy in the extra- 

 academical school of Edinburgh in association with Dr. Allen Thomson, 

 who taught physiology. This association subsisted during the four 

 following years of Dr. Sharpey's stay in Edinburgh. At this time a 

 keen competition existed among the four teachers who, in addition to 

 the Professor within the University, divided among them the students 

 who applied for instruction; and as Dr. Sharpey's class increased 

 during the period mentioned from twenty-two to eighty-eight, we 

 may regard his success as complete in point of number, while his 

 reputation as a teacher and man of science had advanced in a still 

 greater degree, so that he had now come to be generally known both in 

 the seat of his labours and at a distance as one of the most judicious, 

 learned, and accurate investigators and teachers of his favourite 

 science. 



From 1829 to 1836, Dr. Sharpey was also actively engaged in 

 scientific investigations ; among which the earliest and perhaps the 

 most novel and important were those on ciliary motion, described in a 

 paper published in 1830 (" On a peculiar Motion excited in Fluids 

 by the surfaces of Certain Animals," " Edin. Med. and Surg. 



