Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/371

Rh was signalized by his account of the gorilla, based upon specimens forwarded to him by Dr. Savage. This was the first scientific description of the new Troglodytes.

From that time forward his scientific progress was rapid and unbroken. He collected, he investigated, he lectured, he wrote. His admirable course of lectures upon Comparative Physiology, before the Lowell Institute, in 1849 (the report of which in pamphlet form has long been out of print), soon caused him to be regarded as the foremost among American anatomists and physiologists.

During this period, and indeed until within a few years of his death, Prof. Wyman published frequent brief notices of new animals, of points of structure and function, the value of which is in no way to be measured by their length. Almost any one of them would have served a less modest man for an extended memoir, while several contain the elements of interesting popular articles. So far from this, Prof. Wyman seemed to attach little personal importance to them, rarely referred to them, or took any pains to have them reproduced elsewhere. Many were, however, copied into European journals.

His first extended paper was "On the Nervous System of Rana pipiens" (the bull-frog). It covers fifty quarto pages, with two plates, was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1853, and should be in the hands of every student of either human or comparative anatomy, as the clearest introduction to the most complex of animal structures.

Somewhat similar to the last, not quite so long, but even more replete with fact and philosophy, is the "Observations on the Development of Raia batis" (a skate), published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1864. This was based upon few materials, but sufficed to convince him, and all naturalists, that the skate ranks higher than the shark, since the latter retains through life a general form resembling one of the stages through which the former passes during its development.

Those who knew Wyman's nature may well imagine how he shrank from any thing like a discussion of two great questions upon which so much has been written during the past fifteen years, namely, the "Origin of Species" and "Spontaneous Generation." But, aside from his natural desire to know and teach the most correct doctrine upon these subjects, his prominent position made it imperative that he should consider them carefully. Respecting evolution, he evidently felt, with Prof. Gray, that, "upon very many questions, a truly wise man remains long in a state of neither belief nor unbelief; but your intellectually short-sighted people are apt to be preternaturally clear-sighted, and to find their way very quickly to one or the other side of every mooted question." In 1863 he wrote as follows: "We must either assume, on the one hand, that living organisms commenced their existence fully formed, and by processes not in accordance with