CARPENTER, WILLIAM BENJAMIN (1813–1885), naturalist, was the fourth child and eldest son of Dr. Lant Carpenter [q. v.], and brother of Mary and Philip Carpenter [q. v.] He was born at Exeter on 29 Oct. 1813. His father removed to Bristol in 1817; young Carpenter received his early education there in his father's notable school, and acquired both exact classical and scientific knowledge. He was anxious to be a civil engineer, but sacrificed his inclination when pressed to become the pupil of Mr. Estlin, the family doctor. He passed some time in the West Indies as companion to Mr. Estlin, and his experience of social conditions preceding the abolition of slavery led him to be throughout life a cautious and moderate rather than an ardent reformer.
After some preliminary work at the Bristol Medical School, Carpenter entered University College, London, in 1833, as a medical student, and it is significant of a mania for lectures then encouraged that he often attended thirty-five lectures a week, as his note-books show. He also attended the Middlesex Hospital for some time. After obtaining the Surgeons' and Apothecaries' diplomas in 1835 he went to the Edinburgh Medical School and commenced researches on physiology. He wrote papers which showed a marked tendency to seek large generalisations and to bring all the natural sciences to the elucidation of vital functions. His early papers, ‘On the Voluntary and Instinctive Actions of Living Beings’ (‘Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal,’ xlviii. 1837, pp. 22–44), ‘On the Unity of Function in Organised Beings’ (‘Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal,’ xxiii. 1837, pp. 92–116), ‘On the Differences of the Laws regulating Vital and Physical Phenomena’ (ib. xxiv. 1838, pp. 327–53), which obtained the Students' Prize of 30l., and ‘The Physiological Inferences to be deduced from the Structure of the Nervous System of Invertebrated Animals’ (graduation thesis, 1839), the latter of which obtained the notice of Johannes Müller, the first physiologist of the day, who inserted a translation of it in his ‘Archives’ for 1840, were the precursors of his great work, ‘The Principles of General and Comparative Physiology,’ published in 1839. This was the first English book which contained adequate conceptions of a science of biology. A second edition was called for in 1841, and it was recognised that the author was a man of no ordinary mental grasp and range of study.
Before his graduation at Edinburgh Carpenter had become lecturer on medical jurisprudence at the Bristol Medical School, and he afterwards lectured there on physiology also. He found the anxieties of general medical practice too great for his keen susceptibilities, and undertook further literary work, including a useful and comprehensive ‘Popular Cyclopædia of Science,’ 1843. In 1844 he removed to London, gaining the post of Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal Institution, and being elected a fellow of the Royal Society in the same year. He was appointed lecturer on physiology at the London Hospital, and professor of forensic medicine at University College. He was also for some years examiner in physiology and comparative anatomy at the University of London, and Swiney lecturer on geology at the British Museum. From 1847 to 1852 he edited the ‘British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review,’ and from 1851 to 1859 he was principal of University Hall, the residence for students at University College. In 1856, on appointment as registrar of the University of London, he resigned his lectureships, and thenceforward was the chief worker in the great development of that university till his resignation in 1879, when he received the distinction of a C.B. He was appointed a crown member of the senate on the next vacancy, and continued an active member till his death, which occurred on 19 Nov. 1885, from severe burns received by the accidental upsetting of a makeshift spirit-lamp while he was taking a vapour bath.
Carpenter was one of the last examples of an almost universal naturalist. Some of his most valuable and laborious work was done in zoology. In a series of papers and reports to the British Association, commencing in 1843, and to the Royal, Microscopical, and Geological Societies, he gave the results of his own and others' inquiries into the microscopic structure of shells. These were followedby a set of four memoirs in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ 1856–60, on the foraminifera. In 1862 the Ray Society published his ‘Introduction to the Study of the Foraminifera,’ in which he was largely assisted by Professors W. K. Parker and T. Rupert Jones; it is a memoir of fundamental importance on the subject. As late as 1882 he contributed an important paper on Orbitolites to the ‘Philosophical Transactions.’ Marine zoology also largely interested him, and out of his summer excursions to Arran, when he studied the feather-stars, grew a large scheme of deep-sea exploration. In the spring of 1868 he studied the crinoids near Belfast with Professor Wyville Thomson, and in the same year they explored the fauna and other phenomena of the sea-bottom between the north of Ireland and the Faroe islands in the Lightning. This was followed
