of Edinburgh, Session 1880-81. 
113 
•which, he was one of the secretaries from 1853 to 1872. Those who 
were most fully acquainted with the affairs of the Society know 
best the anxious care and judicious labour which he bestowed upon 
its business, and readily distinguish the mark of his able assistance 
in the promotion of various measures having important relations to 
the interests of the Society and the advance of science which were 
the subjects of deliberation during his tenure of office. 
Dr Sharpey became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 
in 1834. He was member of many other societies in this country 
and on the Continent; and he received the honorary degree of 
LL.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1859. 
Dr Sharpey was by no means a copious writer, nor could he be 
regarded as the author of many new discoveries, yet it is universally 
acknowledged that great value is to be attached to his original 
observations and the productions of his pen. 
He never wrote out his lectures fully, but made use only of jottings 
on small slips of paper, and only tw T o or three of his introductory 
lectures have been published in the medical journals. 
During the time of his residence in Edinburgh, or from 1829 to 
1836, he was actively engaged in original research; and among the 
earliest and in one sense the most important of his observations 
were those relating to Ciliary Motion, first described in his paper 
“ On a Peculiar Motion excited in Fluids by the surfaces of 
Animals” ( Edin . Med. and Surg. Journ ., 1830, vol. civ.), and 
which formed the basis of his very able and complete article 
“ Cilia,” which appeared in the Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and 
Physiology in 1836. It is true that Dr Sharpey, as he afterwards 
found, had been anticipated in several of his observations, and 
further, that, from the want of sufficiently high magnifying powers in 
his microscope, he failed to detect the actual existence of cilia in 
the larvae of Amphibia in which he had observed the motions, — a 
discovery which was made by Purkinje and Valentin in 1834, — but 
it cannot be doubted that, by the numerous original observations 
which Dr Sharpey described in his earlier paper, he was the first to 
point out distinctly the general prevalence of ciliary motion among 
animals, and the important relations of its phenomena to respiration 
and some other functions. The article “ Cilia,” as also that of 
“ Echinodermata,” which in 1837 he contributed to the same 
