Address of Thomas Bell, Esq., V.P.R.S., etc., the President, read at the anniversary meeting of the Linnean Society on Wednesday, May 24, 1854 : together with obituary notices of deceased members.

  • Bell, Thomas, 1792-1880.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address of Thomas Bell, Esq., V.P.R.S., etc., the President, read at the anniversary meeting of the Linnean Society on Wednesday, May 24, 1854 : together with obituary notices of deceased members. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    17/32 (page 17)
    which he entered into general practice at the West-End of London ; but his heart was wholly in his scientific pursuits, and after a few years he resigned the practice of his profession, and depended almost entirely on a pension of £100 a yesir from the Civil List. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1846, and of the Linnean in 1847 ; and his time was constantly occupied in researches into the more abstruse points of Animal Anatomy and Physiology, the results of which he communicated chiefly in papers read before those Societies, and before the Entomological Society, of which he was for two years (1844-1845) President. In his researches he was peculiarly re- markable for the sagacity with which he planned his course of ob- servations, the extreme neatness and ingenuity of his contrivances, his ready manipulation, the minuteness of his dissections, and an acquired dexterity in drawing either with the right hand or with the left, which gave him great advantages in microscopical delineations. As an observer it is astonishing how much he accomplished in his earlier days with optical means of a very imperfect kind, and how little he found to correct in these observations when supplied with the best modem instruments. By these, however, he was enabled to enlarge the field of his observations, and to make great advances towards the solution of various problems of high physiological in- terest, more especially in relation to the reproduction of lost parts, and the impregnation and development of the ovum in vertebrated animals. It was while engaged in searching in the marshy grounds near Shepherd’s Bush for his annual supply of frogs and other am- phibious animals, with a view to the farther prosecution of his re- searches on the last-named subject, that he caught a severe cold, terminating in fever, of the effects of which he died at his residence in Cambridge Street, on the 7th of last month, and in the fifty-second year of his age. The following is a list of his papers in the Philo- sophical and Linnean Transactions, and in those of the Entomo- logical Society:— 1. On the Nervous System of the Sphinx Ligustri, and the changes which it undergoes during a part of the Metamorphoses of the Insect. Phil. Trans. 1832, p. 383. 2 On the Nervous System of Sphinx Ligustri (Part 2) during the later stages of its Pupa and its Imago State; and on the means by which its development is effected. Phil. Trans. 1834, p. 389. 3. On the Respiration of Insects. Phil. Trans. 1836, p. 529. 4. On the Temperature of Insects, and its connexion with the Functions of Respiration and Circulation in this Class of Inverte- brated Animals. Phil. Trans. 1837, p. 259. 5. On the Organs of Reproduction and the Development of the B