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Rh his studies on his return, at Bristol, then at University College, London, and finally in the University of Edinburgh, where he received the degree of M. D, in 1839. His graduating thesis, which gained for him a gold medal, was on "The Physiological Inferences to be deduced from the Structure of the Nervous System of Invertebrated Animals." It attracted considerable attention on account of some peculiar special views advanced in it, and it pointed out the direction which his future studies were destined to take. previous to his graduation he had been appointed Lecturer on Medical Jurisprudence in the Bristol Medical School. He settled down to practice and married in Bristol; but, in 1844, feeling a distaste, according to Dr. Lankester, for the profession of medicine, he removed to London in order to devote himself entirely to a literary and scientific career. Here he was appointed Fullerian Professor of Physiology in the Royal Institution, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society; in the next year he became a lecturer in the London Hospital; in 1847 a lecturer on geology in the British Museum, one of the examiners of the London University, and editor of the "British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review"; in 1849, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at University College; and in 1852, Principal of University Hall.

Dr. Carpenter began the researches with which his name is associated and the publication of results upon them while still quite young. Two books—Sir John Herschel's "Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy," and Lyell's "Principles of Geology"—exerted a great influence over his mind while he was a student, and served in a certain sense as models in the execution of the literary part of his work. Dr. Lankester remarks that from the first his work showed the tendency of his mind to seek for large generalizations and the development of philosophical principles. "He was a natural philosopher in the widest sense of the term—one who was equally familiar with the fundamental doctrines of physics and with the phenomena of the concrete sciences of astronomy, geology, and biology. It was his aim, by the use of the widest range of knowledge of the facts of nature, to arrive at a general conception of these phenomena as the outcome of uniform and all pervading laws. His interest in the study of living things was not therefore primarily that of the artist and poet so much as that of the philosopher, and it is remarkable that this interest should have carried him, as it did, into minute and elaborate investigations of form and structure." Among his earliest contributions was a paper "On the Voluntary and Instinctive Actions of Living Beings." Before he was twenty-five years old he had published articles on "Vegetable Physiology" and "The Physiology of the Spinal Marrow," and a review of that part of Whewell's "History of the Inductive Sciences" which relates to physiology. His first important essay in the study of the nervous system, the special branch of the science to which he more closely devoted his attention, was a review of Noble's "Physiology of