the investigations on the organization of marine and inferior animals that were going on in our country. We had among us, in the course of a few years, the greater portion of the zoölogists, anatomists, and physiologists of the world. The first door at which they knocked was yours. At that fortunate period for science, your health was considered quite delicate. It has since appeared to all that your love for science gave you the strength which nature had refused you."
To these investigations succeeded his studies on the structure and classification of recent and fossil Polyps, and his monograph on British fossil corals, both prepared in connection with J. Haime (1848 to 1852), and in 1851 a series of memoirs on the morphology and classification of the Crustaceans (since collected in a volume of "Carcinological Miscellanies"). His "General Tendencies of Nature," which appeared in the same year, was on a subject which had occupied him for a long time; for his first publications on the vitality of the different parts of the animal organism, and on the law of the perfectionment of animated beings by the division of physiological labor, date from 1826, and were published in the "Classical Dictionary of Natural History." A monograph on the fossil Polyps of the Palæozoic formations, published also in 1851 in co-operation with M. J. Haime,, forms nearly the whole of the fifth volume of the "Archives of the Museum." Between 1857 and 1860 he published his "Natural History of the Corals Proper," and in 1858 a large volume on the "Recent Progress of Zoölogy in France."
The crowning work of his life, the "Lessons on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Man and Animals," was begun in 1857, and was completed on the publication of the fourteenth volume, of five hundred pages, in 1880. This work includes all the lectures which were delivered by the author at the Museum of Natural History during the twenty-three years that it was in preparation. Professor Michael Foster said of this work, the "beautiful legacy," as Bernard has called it, of the venerable author, reviewing the ninth volume in 1870, in "Nature": "At a time when a 'differentiation' of study is carried to such an extent that many physiologists know very little about other animals than frogs, rabbits, dogs, and men, and many zoologists have a very meager acquaintance with the results of experimental physiology, such a work as this, which skillfully weaves together all the main facts of animal biology, is most wholesome reading."
M. Milne-Edwards was nominated an officer of the Legion of Honor in 1847, and a commander in the same order in 1861. He received the Copley medal of the British Royal Society in 1856, and the Boerhaave medal of the Scientific Society of the Netherlands in 1880, being the first person upon whom that medal had been conferred.
M. de Quatrefages, addressing the subject of this sketch on the occasion of the presentation of the medal to him in 1881, said: "We
