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SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 
and took a pride in going wherever he wished. His taste for natural 
scenery was not probably great, but his determination to secure any 
botanical or entomological specimen which he coveted was such as no 
gamekeeper could thwart. 
From the nature of his occupations it almost followed as a matter of 
necessity that W est did not do much work in his own name. He had 
to earn his livelihood in a very ill-paid and most engrossing occupation, 
and although he loved it in all its branches he yet felt somewhat keenly 
the fact that it took up all his time. He was accustomed to rise early 
and to work long into the night, yet his work was often in arrears and 
his employers clamorous. Nothing that he undertook was ever scamped. 
Thus it follows that but few original papers are to be credited to his 
pen. His work stands chiefly in other men’s names. A paper on the 
mechanism of the feet of insects was of his own contributions to science 
the one in which he took most pride. Four years of his life were 
devoted to the illustrations of Blackwall’s volumes on English spiders, 
and five to those of Smith on Diatomacese. 
He was a fellow of the Linnean Society from the year 1861, and 
also of the Royal Microscopical Society. He was an honorary member 
of the Zoological and Botanical Society of Vienna, of the Tyneside 
Field Naturalists’ Club, and of the Leeds Naturalists’ Club. 
Joseph Leidy.* — The following is part of a sympathetic notice of our 
late Honorary Fellow: — Dr. Joseph Leidy, the eminent comparative 
anatomist, zoologist, and palaeontologist, died at Philadelphia on the 30th 
of April. He was born in the same city on the 9th of September, 1823. 
His father was a native of Montgomery County, Pa., but his ancestors 
on both sides were Germans from the Valley of the Rhine. While yet 
a schoolboy, minerals and plants were eagerly collected and studied, 
and also anatomical dissections were begun. He entered the Medical 
School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1840, and devoted his first 
year to practical anatomy. Having taken his medical degree in 1844, 
he became the next year, then twenty-one years of age, prosector to 
Dr. Horner, professor of anatomy in the university ; and at the death of 
Dr. Horner, in 1853, he was appointed his successor. 
In 1844 he made the many remarkable dissections of terrestrial 
molluscs, the drawings of which cover sixteen plates and illustrate 
thirty-eight species, in Dr. Binney’s fine work on the Terrestrial Molluscs 
of the United States, showing in all not only remarkable power as an 
anatomist, entitling him to high rank, as Dr. Binney remarks, among 
philosophical zoologists, but also great skill as a draughtsman. Thus 
from the first Dr. Leidy was the thorough, minutely accurate, and un- 
tiring investigator. 
After the publication of Dr. Binney’s work in 1845, Leidy was 
elected a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 
and from that time he was its most active member, hardly a volume of 
its publications appearing without one or more papers on the results of 
his researches. His contributions to zoology and comparative anatomy 
have a wide range. The lower invertebrates occupied a large share of 
his time. Besides multitudes of short papers, he published in 1853 a 
* Amer. Journ. of Science, xli. (1891) pp. 523-5. 
