Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 7.djvu/302

 that time gaining acceptance on the mechanism of reflex action, In the same communication he related a remarkable set of experiments, showing the correspondence in function between the central part of the nervous system of the invertebrata and that of vertebrated animals.

The development of the embryo of the invertebrata largely occupied Mr. Newport's attention, and among other more or less valuable results of his inquiries, he made out the remarkable process of growth of the young Myriapod, by the interpolation of successive new segments at one determinate and limited region of the body. The paper in which these observations were communicated was nominated as the Bakerian Lecture for the year 1841.

In the latter years of Mr. Newport's suddenly interrupted life, he was led to investigate with his usual zeal and industry the recondite process of the impregnation of the ovum. He chose the egg of the Frog as the subject of his experiments, and recorded the results in three papers communicated to the Society, the last of which, partly prepared at the time of his death, and afterwards completed from his written memoranda by his friend Professor Ellis, is inserted in the present volume of the Philosophical Transactions. In his inquiries into this question he endeavoured to determine the several conditions which affect fecundation, whether depending on the state of the parent animals and their generative products or on the influence of extrinsic circumstances ; but the main result at which he arrived was the confirmation, by his observations on the Frog, of the view already adopted by some physiologists on other evidence, that in the process of fecundation the spermatozoids actually reach the interior of the ovum.

In Mr. Newport's studies of insects and other invertebrated animals, it was more to his taste to investigate structure, function, and habits, than to occupy himself with zoological description and arrangement; but that he could ably deal with the classification and natural-history relations of animals is shown in his admirable monograph on the Myriapoda, in the Transactions of the Linnean Society.

Mr. Newport was endowed with singular aptitude for the pursuit he had chosen. His well-known skill of hand in minute anatomical research, and his ingenuity in devising and dexterity in