of the snake-bird — a very curious observation illustrating his perpetual vigilance, which never let a significant fact escape him as an unmeaning accident.

In physiological research his most noted experiments are those on the formation of infusoria in boiled solutions of organic matter contained in hermetically sealed vessels. These were continued for years, and are among the most important which have been made on the great question of biogenesis. His observations on the development of mould in the interior of eggs point in the same direction, as do his experiments on the effects of heated water on living organisms. - The effect of absence of light on the development of tadpoles, long since illustrated by the noted experiments of W. F. Edwards, is another matter which he studied and reported upon. He contrived an exquisite arrangement by which he measured the velocity and force of the ciliary movement. He explained with his accustomed ingenuity the mechanism of the tibio-tarsal joint in the ostrich. But of all his contributions to science no one compares for boldness and brilliancy with the Description of a Double Fœtus, and the illustration of the formation of that and similar monstrosities by the action of bar-magnets on iron filings. The way in which "polar force," as it had been vaguely called, might be supposed to act in the arrangement of the parts of a forming embryo, normal or abnormal, was shown in a manner so startling, yet so simple, that to see him, by the aid of a couple of magnets, give the formula, as it were, of Ritta Christina, or of that "double-headed (and bodied) lady" who was lately exhibiting her accomplishments before us, was like being taken into the workshop of the sovereign Artificer, engaged in the last and greatest of his creative efforts.

In connection with this remarkable paper are published his views on the symmetry and homology of limbs, a subject which has of late received elaborate treatment at the hands of one of his most distinguished former pupils, Professor Wilder, of Cornell University.

In speaking of the law of "anteroposterior symmetry "Professor Wilder says of his instructor that he, "almost alone in this country, has devoted time to eliminating, from the indefinite and often extravagant and absurd shape in which it was left by Oken, the real truth of a principle the most potent and elevated of which the vertebrate body, considered by itself, is capable." Just such a mind as Professor Wyman's is needed to hamstring the vaulting idealisms of men like Oken and Carus. It is not science to say with the first that "the universe is God rotating;" it is not science to confound, with the second, the articulates and the vertebrates in a communism of forced homologies.

Scarcely separable from this class of observations and experiments are those which relate to points of what would have been commonly called natural history. Of these the most noticeable are his studies of the unusual modes of gestation in certain fishes. His attention had been called in the year 1854 to this curious phenomenon by Dr. Cragin, formerly United States Consul at Paramaribo, the capital of Dutch Guiana. In 1857 he visited the market of this place, and there found several species of fish, the males of which had their mouths "crammed to the fullest capacity" with the eggs which the females had laid. None were found in the stomach, and Professor Wyman was of the opinion that the eggs must be disgorged during the time when the animals were feeding. His paper published in Silliman's Journal for 1859 gives an interesting account of this singular partnership in the parental duties. - He describes a species of hornet which builds its nest on the ground. There is a certain strange reptile, known to science as the Scaphiopus solitarius, of which a single specimen had been found in this region by an inquiring country doctor whom some of us well remember, Dr. Andrew Nichols of Danvers. Wyman, who saw where others only looked, dug one up in his own garden, and had very soon found some thirty more in the neighborhood, and gives a description

of them. He sees the flies dying on the panes of his windows, as we all have seen them, leaving a certain white dimness on the glass, and submitting the appearances to microscopic examination makes out the characters of the vegetable parasite which, reversing the common order of nature, has fed upon the body of the little animal. -"Do snakes swallow their young?" asks Mr. F. W. Putnam, and the great naturalist, who, as we remember, did not find ova in the stomach of his strange fishes, answers him not incredulously, but rather as if it were not unlikely, in a quotation from Spenser's Faery Queen, of which these lines form a part:

"A thousand young ones which she daily fed;

Soon as that uncouth light upon them shone, Into her mouth they crept and suddain all were gone."

Nothing can be more modest than the title of his pamphlet of eighteen pages, Notes on the Cells of the Bee. But if Lord Brougham could return from the pale realms where he has learned before this time the limits of his earthly omniscience, he would find his stately approval of the divine geometry an uncalled-for compliment. John Hunter's "Don't think, but try," perhaps modified to "Think and try," inasmuch as experiment must choose some direction or other, was the rule by which Professor Wyman worked here as in all cases; and trial led him to quietly set aside the confident assertion of Lord Brougham as to the absolute and perfect agreement between theory and observation" with reference to the sides and angles of the cells.

After Professor Wyman's appointment as Curator of the Peabody Archæological and Ethnological Museum, his time was largely devoted to the formation and arrangement of the collection which has already become so rich in objects of interest. The liberality of Professor Agassiz transferred from the great Museum of Comparative Zoölogy many of those relics, lacustrine and other, which seemed to find an appropriate place in the new collection. Other additions came from gifts of as

sociations and individuals, including a large number of Mexican antiquities from the Honorable Caleb Cushing, and others still were acquired by purchase. The Curator himself was constantly adding something whenever he had an opportunity, and even during his involuntary exile to a warmer climate on account of his impaired health, he was always busy, as we have said, in those curious explorations, his record of some of which is his last contribution to the pages of a scientific journal.

In 1867 he published, in the American Naturalist, An Account of some of the Kjækkenmoddings (kitchen - middens), or Shell-Heaps in Maine and Massachusetts. In the same year he visited, in company with Mr. G. A. Peabody, of Salem, and Mr. George H. Dunscombe, of Canada West, no less than thirty-two of these shell-heaps. The communication already referred to as his last record in the pages of science was read at a meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, and is thus mentioned in the as yet unpublished report :

"May 20, 1874. "Professor Jeffries Wyman read an account of the discovery of human remains in the fresh-water shell-heaps of Florida, under circumstances which indicate that cannibalism was practised by the early inhabitants living on the shore of the St. John's River."

Here follow some particulars which we may pass over.

"Professor Wyman also gave an account of cannibalism as it existed in the two Americas at the time of the discovery of the country, as well as in later years, and gave the documentary evidence for his statements, the most complete and conclusive of which is derived from the relations of the Jesuits."

In reply to a question as to the evidences of cannibalism in New England, put by Mr. F. W. Putnam,

"Professor Wyman thought there was no sufficient evidence for such a belief, and he also stated that he had never known a case of burial in a shell-heap, but at Doctor's Island, Florida, he had

found a portion of a skeleton apparently buried under a heap, as Mr. Putnam had done in a heap near Forest River at Marblehead."

Such a list of papers as has been given bears the relation of a partial index to the papers themselves. The papers, again, bear the relation of an index to his labors, and to the collections of that beautiful museum which is the ample volume in whose pages those who come after him will read the truest record of his life-long services to science.

Besides the long array of scientific papers, some of the more interesting and important of which have been briefly referred to, mention should be made of the course of twelve lectures on Comparative Physiology, delivered in 1849 before the Lowell Institute, reported by Dr. James W. Stone, and published originally in The Traveller and afterwards in a separate pamphlet. They are characterized by the clearness, method, soundness, and felicity of illustration which always belonged to him as a teacher. To these writings should be added his tributes to the memory of the distinguished surgeon and lover of science, Dr. John Collins Warren, of Dr. Augustus Addison Gould, the hard-working and enlightened student of nature, and of that young man too early lost to science, of a promise so large that no one dared to construct his horoscope and predict his scientific future, Dr. Waldo Irving Burnett.

Those last offices of friendship which he performed with pious care for others, others must now perform for him; some of those, it may be hoped, who knew him most intimately. We know what he would have wished of his eulogist. He would not have suffered that he should indulge in the loud lament justified by the Roman poet, which would acknowledge no restraint of conventional propriety or measure of intensity in grief. He would rather have had him remember the sober words of the Roman philosopher: Est aliquis et dolendi decor - et quemadmodum in ceteris rebus, ita in lachrymis aliquid sat est. Much as we

feel that we have lost, we must also remember how much of him remains. His mind has recorded itself in his collections and in his writings; his character lives in the memory of all who knew him as free from spot or blemish, as radiant with gentle graces as if he had come a visitor from some planet of purer ray than this earth, where selfishness and rivalry jostle each other so rudely in the conflicts of our troubled being.

We naturally wish to know something of the personal traits of such a man in his earlier years. An extract from the communication kindly furnished by his brother, Dr. Morrill Wyman, will call him up before us as a boy and youth.

He

"He early showed an interest in natural history. When less than ten years old he spent half his holidays in solitary walks along the banks of the Charles River and the margin of the creek near the Asylum, to pick up from the sedge anything of interest that might be driven ashore. It was seldom that he returned from these walks without something either dead or alive as a reward of his search. In college the same preference continued, and although he did not neglect the prescribed course, he made many dissections and some skeletons, especially one of a mammoth bull-frog, once an inhabitant of Fresh Pond, which was a subject of interest to his classmates and is now, I believe, in his Museum of Comparative Anatomy. early commenced drawing, but with very little regular instruction; he also, when ten or twelve years old, painted on a panel with house paints a portrait of himself which was something of a likeness, but deficient in proper tints; the nearest approach he could make to the color of his hair was green. His facility in sketching in after life was remarkable; he drew anatomical subjects with great accuracy and rapidity. His drawing upon the blackboard in illustrating his lectures, done as it was as he lectured, was most effective. His diagrams for his lectures to the undergraduates of Harvard College were nearly all drawn and colored by his own hand." In a very pleasant letter, received

while this article is going through the press, Professor Bowen, a college classmate, who was a fellow student with Wyman at Exeter, speaks of him, then a boy of fourteen, as pure-minded, frank, playful, happy, careless, not studious, at least in his school-books, but not mischievous. "He would take long rambles in the woods, and go into water and a-fishing, and draw funny outline sketches in his school-books, and whittle out gimcracks with his penknife, and pitch stones or a ball farther and higher than any boy in the academy, when he ought to have been studying his lessons. Only a few years ago, when we were chatting together about our early life at Exeter and in college, he said in his frank and simple way, with a laugh and half a sigh, Bowen, I made a great mistake in so neglecting distasteful studies, though you may think I made up for it by following the bent of my inclination for catching and dissecting bull-frogs. I have been obliged, even of late years, to study hard on some subjects distinct from and yet collateral with my special pursuits, which I ought to have mastered in my boyhood.' The boy was very like the man, only with age, as was natural, he became more earnest, persistent, and methodical."

One need not be surprised to learn from another classmate, himself distinguished as a scholar, that many of those whom Jeffries Wyman distanced and left out of sight in the longer trial of life stood above him in scholarship during his college course.

We have seen that he early left the ranks of the profession which he had studied, at least as a working member. Kind-hearted, sagacious, thoroughly educated, it might have seemed that he was just the man to be useful, and to gain fortune and renown, as a physician. Why have he and so many others, eminently furnished for professional success, seen fit to give up all their professional prospects and take the almost monastic vows of the devotee to science? Doctor Louis Agassiz, Doctor Asa Gray, Doctor Jeffries Wyman, were all duly qualified to exercise the healing art. They each

left its beaten road for the several paths to which they found themselves called. The divinity which shapes our ends was working through the instincts which they followed. We may pause a moment to contrast their early calling with their actual pursuits.

The art of healing is an occupation worthy of the best and ablest men, but it is less entirely satisfying to the purely scientific mind than other pursuits of equal dignity. Like meteorology, it can watch, and to some extent predict the course of events; it can hang out cautionary signals, and help us to protect ourselves by its counsels; but its problems involve elements which defy our analysis, and health and disease come and go in spite of it, like storm and sunshine. The uncertain and importunate calls of suffering interfere with connected investigations. A physician will have to count the pulses of thirty patients while a physiologist is watching the circulation of a single tadpole. The feelings are too often excited when the observing faculties should be undisturbed; too much time is demanded for that half-social, half-professional intercourse which tends, except in the strongest brains, to partial atrophy of some of the dominant cerebral convolutions. The physician's path is obscured by deceptive appearances which he has no means of clearing up, and obstructed by practical difficulties which he has not the power of overcoming. Disease which he has an hour to study and prescribe for has been silently breeding in the individual for years, perhaps in the family for ages. The laboratory of the pharmaceutist is a narrow-walled apartment, but the earth, the air, the sea, the noonday sun, and the midnight dew distil, exhale, mingle, or convey the poisons that enter at every pore of the double surface of our bodies. It is a weary conflict when one must strike at an unseen foe with an uncertain weapon. Those cruel old verses which ridicule this random warfare with the common enemy — written probably by some poor creature who would have screeched for medical aid at the first twist of a colic - are not wholly without

a sting in these days of larger and surer knowledge :

"Si vis sanari de morbo nescio quali

Accipias herbam, sed quam vel nescio qualem,
Ponas nescio quo, sanaberis nescio quando."

We need not wonder or regret that while Sydenham was reforming the English practice of medicine, his fellowstudent Doctor John Locke gave up his profession to devote himself to the study of the human understanding; that Doctor Carl von Linné became known to all the world as Linnæus the naturalist; that Doctor Thomas Young gradually relinquished physic for physics, and found himself happier in reading the hieroglyphics of Egypt than in unravelling the mysteries of disease; that Doctor William Hyde Wollaston became a chemist, and Doctor Thaddeus William Harris an entomologist. And so we may feel about our good Doctor Jeffries Wyman; excellent as he would have been as a physician, welcome as his gentle voice and pleasant smile would have been at the bedside, keen as he would have been in detecting the nature and causes of disease, and conscientiously assiduous as he would have shown himself in doing all he could to alleviate it, many of his most precious natural gifts would never have found a full opportunity of exercise if he had not followed the course for which nature had marked him out from his boyhood.

For this course he was endowed with the rarest attributes. His acuteness and accuracy of observation were so great that an oversight or an error was not likely to be detected in any of his work by any other than himself. His mental eye was not only, as we should say of a good microscope, at once remarkable for penetration and definition, but it was as nearly achromatic as we can hope to find any human organ of intellectual vision. His word was as trustworthy as a plumb-line or a spirit-level. If Jeffries Wyman had asserted that he had himself seen a miracle, there are not a few questioners of tradition who would accept a revelation on the strength of it.

In his laboratory he commonly made use, as Wollaston did, of the simplest

appliances. Give him a scalpel, a pair of forceps, a window to work at, and anything that ever had life in it to work on, and he would have a preparation for his shelves in the course of a few hours or days, as the case might be, that would illustrate something or other which an anatomist or a physiologist would find it a profit and pleasure to study. Under a balanced bell-glass he kept a costly and complicated microscope, but he preferred working with an honest, oldfashioned, steady-going instrument of the respectable, upright Oberhaueser pattern. His outfit for happy employment was as simple as John the Baptist's for prophecy. Who are so rich as the poet and the man of science? "The meanest flower that blows" is an unfathomable mine of thought to the one, and the poor beetle that we tread upon" holds a whole museum of nature's miracles for the other.

He was never so busy that he would not turn aside to answer a student's question or show a visitor any object he might wish to see. Where he was in doubt, he never made any pretence of knowing, and like all wise men he knew well of how much we are all ignorant.

If he had ambition it was latent under other predominating characteristics. So far as could be seen, his leading motive was an insatiable, always active, but never spasmodic desire of learning some new secret of nature. If a discovery came in his way he told of it without any apparent self-applause or vanity. He, who never made blunders, might fairly be indulged in a quiet smile at those of his neighbors, but he was considerate with scientific weaklings, and corrected them as tenderly as Isaac Walton would have the angler handle his frog. Dr. Kneeland speaks of him in his letter to the writer, as he appeared in the chair as President of the Natural History Society:

"He presided with the gentleness and courtesy so characteristic of him; he was always ready with some fact from his carefully arranged storehouse to confirm or disprove statements made before the Society. He was patient of