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Sir John Tomes was born in 1815, and died at Caterham, where lie 

 had for many years resided, on July 29 of this year. 



Although his father was a man of high intellectual attainments, 

 and was deeply versed in the metaphysical literature of his day, 

 neither he nor any other member of the family had ever shown any 

 bent in the direction of biological or medical science. Nevertheless, 

 Sir John in his boyhood acquired a good knowledge of field natural 

 history, to which he was partly led by being a most enthusiastic 

 sportsman, a taste which lasted the whole of his life, and he early 

 decided to take up the profession of medicine. 



With this in view, he was apprenticed to a hard-riding, hard- 

 drinking country practitioner of the old school, and after acquiring 

 a rough and ready acquaintance with the practice of that period, lie 

 came to London and entered at the Middlesex and King's College, 

 in 1836, where he became acquainted with Todd, Bowman, Kiernan, 

 Quekett, Carpenter, Edward Forbes, and with almost all of the band 

 of workers in histology who were then rising into notice. 



In a fragmentary diary which he then kept he is found spending his 

 -evenings with one or other of these friends, and, whilst living upon 

 scanty means, purchasing a microscope of Powell (afterwards Powell 

 and Lealand). 



Owing to the scarcity of competent men, it happened that he spent 

 two years as house surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital, and during 

 this period he fed a nest of young sparrows and a sucking-pig upon 

 madder ; the sections' of their bones still exist, and are as good as 

 any sections of hard tissues that have been since made with all the 

 improved appliances of modern times. 



Whilst house surgeon he had a great many teeth to extract, and 

 finding the instruments then in vogue clumsy and ill-adapted to the 

 purpose, he invented the forceps now in universal use the world 

 over. His marked mechanical ability led the late Sir Thomas Watson 

 and the late Mr. Arnott to advise him to adopt dental surgery as his 

 profession, and in doing so his attention became especially directed 

 io the histology of teeth and bone, with which thenceforward his 

 scientific researches were almost exclusively concerned. 



In 1849 he contributed a paper upon the structure of the dental 

 tissues of the Marsupialia, and in the following year one upon the 

 dental tissues of Rodentia, which were published in the ' Phil. 

 Trans.' In 1852 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and 

 in the same year communicated an important paper, written in con- 

 junction with his intimate friend the late Campbell de Morgan, upon 

 the structure and development of bone. In 1856 he discovered the 

 existence of the soft fibrils in dentine, which have since been known 

 ;as Tomes' fibrils ; this paper also appeared in the i Phil. Trans.' 



Besides these papers, he made numerous communications to the 



