Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/370

356 brother. He was prepared for college at Phillips (Exeter) Academy, entered Harvard University in 1829, and was there graduated. During his last year in college he had an attack of pneumonia, which nearly proved fatal; this doubtless predisposed him to the pulmonary weakness from which he suffered during the latter part of his life, and from which he died on the 4th of September, 1874, at Bethlehem, New Hampshire.

Soon after his graduation he entered the Harvard Medical School, and, in 1836, became "house medical student" in the Massachusetts General Hospital.

In 1837 he received the degree of M. D. His graduation thesis was upon the eye, and accompanied by drawings. It does not appear to have been published, but, in September of the same year, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal contained a paper by him upon the "Indistinctness of Images formed by Oblique Rays of Light." Soon afterward he became Demonstrator of Anatomy in the Medical School under Prof. J. C. Warren, whose chair he was destined afterward to fill.

In 1839 he accepted the curatorship of the newly-founded Lowell Institute. Two years later he delivered therein his first course of public lectures (of which no report has come under our notice), and with the money so earned went abroad for a year to pursue his medical and scientific studies under the great European masters. He had already, since 1838, published, in the American Journal of Science, several brief papers upon anatomical and physiological matters.

In 1843 there were published, in the Journal of the Boston Society of Natural History, anatomical descriptions of two gasteropod mollusks (Tebennophorus Carolinensis and Glandina truncata). Likewise a paper on the chimpanzee (Troglodytes niger), in which, with characteristic modesty, his account of its organization (though subversive of some of Owen's previous conclusions) is subordinated to Dr. Savage's remarks upon its habits and external characters. The same year he was appointed Professor of Anatomy in the Hampton-Sidney Medical College, at Richmond, Virginia. During his four years' stay his contributions to science included some notes upon fossil remains of vertebrates, and longer papers upon the blind fish of the Mammoth Cave and the teeth of the gar-pike (Lepidosteus). The latter paper is illustrated by microscopic sections, showing the close resemblance of the gar-pike's teeth to those of the fossil batrachian Labyrinthodon. The article closes with the suggestion that some of the separate teeth then referred by Owen to the latter genus might really belong to Lepidostean forms. This paper alone, though little known and never quoted by its author, would serve to show what manner of man was rising in America.

In 1847, at the age of thirty-three, he was chosen to the Hersey Professorship of Anatomy, at Cambridge. The year of his