Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/247

Rh happy home for him, by his marriage with Miss Ann Blyth. Four years fol- lowed, in which his researches were chiefly directed to the natural history of the marine animals so plentiful on the Fifeshire coast, and the results of which he communicated in several papers to the "Annals and Magazine of Natural History." In 1848 he made a collection, in one volume, of the essays which he had published in several scientific journals during the course of thirteen years. The work is entitled, "Physiological, Anatomical, and Pathological Researches," and consists of twenty- eight articles. Of the value of these, especially of the six that contain the results of his inquiries into the functions of living organs, it would be impossible to convey an adequate idea, without such a full analysis as would far exceed the plan and limits of our work. We content ourselves with quoting, from a host of congenial critics who reviewed the volume, the opinions of one who was well qualified to estimate its worth. "As a physiologist," says Dr. J. H. Bennett, " he [Dr. Reid] may be considered to have been unsurpassed; not, indeed, because it has fallen to his lot to make those great discoveries or wide generalizations which constitute epochs in the history of the science, but because he possessed such a rare degree of caution and conscientiousness in all his researches, that no kind of investigation, whether literary, anatomical, physiological, or pathological, that could illustrate any particular fact, did he ever allow to be neglected His volume contains more original matter and sound physiology than will be found in any work that has issued from the British press for many years."

Dr. Reid was now a happy man, in the fullest sense of the term. With a happy home", and an extensive circle of friends, by whom he was honoured and beloved, his scientific, aspirations were every day advancing towards that termination upon which his heart had been fixed for years. " My worldly circumstances," he wrote afterwards to a friend, "were assuming a more comfortable aspect; my constitution, until lately, was robust; my age still in its prime (within some months of forty years); I had formed plans for carry ing on investigations into the structure and vital actions of the lower organized bodies, which can be so readily procured from this coast, little thinking that disease was so soon to overtake me. I had my dreams of being able to add something of importance to the deeply attractive and instructive matters embraced in such investigations; and I was looking forward to the time when I should be able to say that I have done something which will prevent me from being readily forgotten." But while he was thus in the full flush of health and strength, of happiness and hope, a fearful pause occurred. A small, insignificant-looking blister made its appearance upon his tongue, which, instead of departing, continued to increase, until it became a confirmed ulcer; and on examining this suspicious plague-spot, it was found to be the sure commencement of a cancer. He was thus to be the victim of a disease the most loathsome and incurable, while the only prospect which it held out was nothing but months of anguish and torture, until his iron frame should be worn out, and his strength prostrated into utter helplessness, so that death might come to his relief. He changed his residence from place to place in search of alleviation from pain, and submitted to torturing operations, in the faint hope that the malady might be eradicated; but its fangs were too deeply inserted, and too firmly closed, to be thus loosed from their hold. It was a barbed arrow, which no surgery could extract; and nothing remained for him but to linger upon the outskirts of the fight of life, in which he had hitherto borne himself so bravely, and await the moment of