Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/766

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
748
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ciety in 1844, and in the following year he obtained a lectureship at the London Hospital. A lectureship in geology was bestowed on him, by the trustees of the British Museum, in 1847, and in the same year he became one of the examiners of the London University. He also succeeded Dr. Forbes as editor of the British and Foreign Medical Review, to which he had been a constant contributor for years, and which was now amalgamated with the Medico-Chirurgical Review, under the title British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review. Besides editorial supervision, he continued to contribute articles to this periodical, on a wide range of subjects. In 1849 he was appointed Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at University College, a post which he held for ten years.

Some six or eight years had already elapsed from the time when Mr. Grove first promulgated his views on the now well-known doctrine of the "Correlation of Physical Forces." As indicated by the title of his treatise, Mr. Grove did not attempt to show the equivalence of the so-called "vital force" with the physical forces; but confined himself to proving the mutual convertibility of the physical forces—motion, heat, electricity, light, magnetism, etc. In a memoir communicated to the Royal Society in 1850, Dr. Carpenter carried the argument further; he attempted to bring the "vital force" also within the generalization, proving that it has its origin in solar light and heat, and not, as is commonly believed, in a power inherent in the germ.

The reader will form an idea of the success of Dr. Carpenter's two principal, works from the fact that, as early as in 1851, a third edition of the "Comparative Physiology," and a fourth of the "Human Physiology," were called for. Very high authorities have expressed their appreciation of these works, and the debt which recent physiology owes to them. Among these authorities may be mentioned Sir Benjamin Brodie, who, in his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Royal Society in 1861, said that Dr. Carpenter's works "have served, more perhaps than any others of their time, to spread the knowledge of those sciences, and promote their study among a large class of readers;" and that, "while they admirably fulfil their purpose as systematic expositions of the current state of knowledge on the subjects which they comprehend, they afford evidence throughout of much depth and extent of original thought on some of the great questions of physiology." The field where, perhaps, Dr. Carpenter has been most successful, is that border-land between the physical and the psychical, between matter and mind—the nervous system and its functions. He has also given his thoughts on another topic of present interest, in an article on the "Varieties of the Human Race;" where he argues strongly on physiological and psychological grounds for the specific unity of mankind.

In 1852 Dr. Carpenter relinquished the editorship of theMedico-