2 
Transactions of the Society . 
Seamen’s Club and observes the bouses surrounding the enclosure he 
will notice that many of them are old, and have been good substantial 
brick houses, pleasant enough to live in ; and that some bear consider- 
able remains of artistic ornament. Following round the enclosure he 
will pass Messrs. Geo. Wybrow’s pickle manufactory, and between 
that and Messrs. Greenfield, Harvey & Co’s, brewery, he will find a 
house which certainly looks as if it had stood there for considerably 
more than half a century ; at the present moment its bell-handles 
are broken relics, and the ridge-tiles of its roof look as if they would 
be better for a little repair; but this house is No. 50 Wellclose 
Square, and there, in the year 1839, lived Edwin J. Quekett, F.L.S., 
and in its drawing-room, on the 3rd September of that year, seventeen 
gentlemen assembled “ to take into consideration the propriety of 
forming a society for the promotion of microscopical investigation, 
and for the introduction and improvement of the Microscope as a 
scientific instrument.” Probably few of my hearers have ever heard of 
Edwin Quekett, he has been so entirely overshadowed by the fame of 
his younger brother John ; but Edwin Quekett was a man of con- 
siderable scientific reputation, and had he lived longer he would 
probably have increased it. Born at Langport, in Somerset, in 
September 1808, he commenced his studies for the medical profession 
at University College when he was just twenty ; there he gained one 
gold medal in anatomy and physiology, another in practical anatomy, 
and a silver medal in chemistry, besides a certificate of honour in 
every class he attended. He practised his profession at Wellclose 
Square, but he was chiefly known as lecturer on botany at the 
London Hospital medical school. He contributed numerous scientific 
papers to the various Societies and journals of his time, including 
six important papers to our own Transactions. He died at his house 
in Wellclose Square on the 20th June, 1847, under the age of 
thirty-nine. 
Seventeen men did not meet at Edwin Quekett’s house on that 
3rd September, 1839, by pure accident ; coming events had thrown their 
shadows before ; nor was Edwin Quekett the only man of science, or 
the only one of our original members who lived in Wellclose Square. 
At No. 57 lived the Bev. William Quekett, who was the original of 
Charles Dickens’ sketch in the second volume of ‘Household Words,’ 
entitled, What a London curate can do if he tries.” At No. 46 
lived Charles Foulger; at No. 45 lived Edward Newman, the well- 
known entomologist and for so many years editor of the ‘ Zoologist,’ 
whose connection with microscopy included not only his original 
membership of this Society, but also his famous diatribe upon the 
ignorance of microscopists apropos of some one having mistaken the 
curious eggs of the Stone-Mite for a new fungus, and called it 
Craterium joyriforme ; and last, but by no means least, at No. 7 lived 
Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, the botanist and inventor of the Wardian 
case. He was born in 1791, at Plaistow, in Essex, where his father 
