XXV11 



Marie- Jean Pierre Flourens, elected Foreign Member of the Royal 

 Society in 1835, was born at Maureilhan, near Beziers, Department of 

 Herault, in April 1/94. He studied Medicine at Montpellier, where he 

 took his Doctor's degree at the age of nineteen, and in the year following 

 went to Paris. There he made the friendship of various eminent men, 

 — of whom are noted especially Cbaptal and Frederick Cuvier, — and 

 devoted himself to the pursuit of Biological science, in which he soon 

 attained reputation as a writer and original inquirer. His earliest and 

 most important labours were directed towards the investigation of the 

 functions of the nervous system, and on his experimental researches and 

 writings on this department of Physiology, which continued afterwards 

 to be his favourite pursuit, his scientific reputation may be said mainly to 

 rest. The first fruits of these researches were made known in three 

 Memoirs presented to the Academy of Sciences of Paris in 1822 and 

 1823; and subsequently published in an independent work entitled " Re- 

 cherches Experimental sur les proprietes et les fonctions du systeme 

 nerveux dans les animaux vertebres." Paris 1824. Of this a second and 

 greatly extended edition appeared in 1842, containing the substance of 

 Memoirs presented to the Academy since the publication of the first edi- 

 tion, with applications of the author's doctrines to pathology and surgery, 

 researches on the reunion of divided nerves, on the movements of the brain, 

 on tbe pulsation of arteries, and on the effects of section of the semicircular 

 canals of the ear — also an extension of his previous inquiries to reptiles 

 and fish. 



Following in the line of Haller, Zinn, Lorry, Saucerotte, Magendie, and 

 others, Flourens endeavoured, by inflicting injuries experimentally on the 

 encephalon and spinal cord, but especially by studying the effect of removal 

 of definite portions of these organs, to assign the specific offices of the 

 several parts of the cerebrospinal centre ; and whatever difference of opinion 

 may prevail as to some of the physiological conclusions at which he arrived, 

 it must be admitted that his experiments, which have for the most part 

 been confirmed by later inquirers, have served in large measure as a basis 

 of subsequent reasoning on the subject. 



On his first coming to Paris Flourens became a writer in the ' Revue 

 Encvclopedique/ and contributed articles to the ' Dictionnaire classique 

 d'llistoire Naturelle,' and in the course of his life published numerous 

 papers on different anatomical and physiological subjects, besides that with 

 which he was more enduringly occupied. The titles of these papers (up to 

 1863) form a goodly array in the Royal Society's Catalogue, to which we 

 refer for details. The more notable of them are on the nutrition and 

 growth of bone, on the structure of the skin and mucous membranes and 

 on the epidermis and its appendages in man and animals, on the mechanism 

 of Rumination, on vomiting in ruminants and its non-occurrence in the 

 Horse, on the vascular connexion of mother and foetus, &c, while some are 

 on questions of anthropology, comparative psychology, and natural history ; 



YOL. XVIII. d 



