SOME OF THE FOUNDERS OF THE SOCIETY. 
55 
lecturer on anatomy and physiology. The business of the session 
(October, 1865), was inaugurated by Mr. Paget, of St. Bartholomew's 
Hospital, in a newly-erected building of chastely-ornamental architec- 
ture, and furnished with appliances for medical teaching. In 1837 
Mr. Teale joined the newly -formed "West Riding Geological and 
Polytechnic Society, and took an active interest in its proceedings. 
He occasionally presided at its meetings. On Dec. 6th, 1839, he 
contributed a valuable paper to the proceedings of the Society on 
the Fossil Ichthyology of the Yorkshire Coal-field. 
Mr. Teale belonged to the numerous class of medical men who, 
while faitlifuUy devoted to their professions, have found relief from 
study in the variety afforded by other scientific pursuits. He was 
long well known, in and far beyond his native town, as one of 
the chief contributors to the more than ordinary success of the 
Leeds Philosophical Society, in which he held, for upwards of thirty 
years, the office of honorary curator of the Zoological Department. 
He was elected president in the years 1860 and 1861. Among his 
numerous papers read before this Society may be found some of an 
original character and special interest. In the transactions for 1837, 
we may notice an account of a beautiful Zoophyte — the Alcyonella — 
which was discovered in 1835 in ponds near Leeds, and had not been 
previously recognized as a British animal. The same volume contains 
also Mr. Teale' s anatomical description, with illustrated plates, of 
Actinia. These have been largely made use of in systematic works 
on comparative anatomy, since published, both at home and abroad. 
On the 9th May, 1838, Mr. Teale read a paper on Stigmaria at a 
meeting of the Geological Section of the Society. 
In 1856 Mr. Teale read before the West Riding Geological and 
Polytechnic Society a paper on a geological deposit in the valley of 
the Aire, near Leeds, in which bones of the hippopotamus major and 
the mammoth had recently been found. The object of the paper 
was to show that this deposit was newer than the northern drift 
which it overlaid, and, consequently, that these great northern 
pachyderms had not become extinct until post glacial times. This 
view, now generally regarded as confirmed by numerous later and 
independent observations, was, at the date of the reading of the 
