An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, &c. London, 1798.

An Account of some Experiments made with the Vapour of Boiling Tar in the Cure of Pulmonary Consumption. 1817.

On the Treatment and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption, and the Effects of Boiling Tar on that Disease. 1823.

Commentaries on some Doctrines of a dangerous tendency in Medicine, and on the general principles of Safe Practice. 1842.

GEORGE JAMES GUTHRIE was born in London on the 1st of May, 1785, and died on the 71st anniversary of his birthday. He was descended from an old and respectable Forfarshire family, one of whom, his great-grandfather, married an Irish lady, and settled in her country. His father, a manufacturer of plaister and other surgical materials, raised himself from poverty to considerable wealth; but, late in life, was again impoverished, and left his son at an early age to seek and work his own way in the world. He was educated in boyhood by an emigrant French gentleman, M. Noel; and, when thirteen years old, he was apprenticed to the medical profession, at the instance of Mr. Rush, one of the Army Medical Board. For a time he received his chief instruction from Dr. Hooper, one of the most active pathologists of the day. In June 1800 Mr. Rush appointed him an hospital-assistant at York Hospital (a military hospital which then stood on part of the site of Eaton Square); and in the following winter he assisted Mr. Carpue in teaching anatomy. In the beginning of 1801 he was to have been removed from his appointment, with all the other hospital-assistants who had not been examined at the College of Surgeons; and it gave proof of the suc cess with which he had already studied, and promise of the spirit which marked his after-life, that he immediately offered himself for the examination. He passed, and obtained his diploma at the College in February 1801; and in the next month, though not yet sixteen, was appointed assistant-surgeon to the 29th Regiment, with which, from 1802 to 1807, he served in North America.

In 1808, Mr. Guthrie having risen to the surgeoncy of his regiment, accompanied it to Spain; and from that time to the end of the Peninsular war (with the exception of a period of severe illness in 1810), was engaged in the most active service. He had a chief share in the charge of the wounded at the battles of Roliça and Vimiera ;

at the taking of Oporto; at Talavera and Albuera; at the sieges of Olivença and Badajos; at Ciudad Rodrigo, Salamanca, and Toulouse. In these fields of action he justly earned the highest reputation among the British military surgeons of his time; and all his writings prove that they were to him fields not only of action but of study.

In September 1814, Mr. Guthrie was placed on half-pay, and commenced private practice in London. After the battle of Waterloo, he spent a few weeks at the military hospitals at Brussels and Antwerp, studying chiefly those points of practice on which his Peninsular experience had left him uncertain. Returned to London, he commenced lecturing on surgery in 1816, and was appointed surgeon to the Westminster Ophthalmic Hospital, the establishment of which was chiefly due to his exertions. In 1826 he was elected assistant-surgeon, and in 1827 full surgeon to the Westminster Hospital. In the last-named year, also, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the College of Surgeons, he became a Member of the Council in 1824, President in 1833, 1842, and 1854, and during five years was Professor of Anatomy and Surgery. [Nearly all the foregoing statements are derived from an evidently authentic biography of Mr. Guthrie in the Lancet' of June 15, 1850.]

It would be very difficult to form a catalogue of Mr. Guthrie's publications, for he was always active in publishing his knowledge and opinions on all the questions which he had had opportunities of studying. His chief works are,-" On Gun-shot Wounds of the Extremities requiring Amputation" (1815); "Lectures on the Operative Surgery of the Eye" (1823); "On the Diseases and Injuries of Arteries" (1830); "On the Anatomy and Surgery of Herniæ" (1833); "On the Anatomy and Diseases of the Urinary and Sexual Organs" (1836); "On Injuries of the Head, affecting the Brain” (1842); "On Wounds and Injuries of the Abdomen and the Pelvis" (1847); "Commentaries on the Surgery of the War in Portugal, Spain, France, and the Netherlands," of which the last edition was published in 1855, and comprised additional observations on the Surgery of the Crimean war.

Enterprise, activity, and self-reliance were the chief characteristics of Mr. Guthrie's mind. His intellect was acute and clear; his

habits orderly and business-like; his constitution naturally robust, and, till he reached old age, capable of great exertion and endurance. These qualities, in circumstances so favourable to their exercise as those of the Peninsular war, quickly and justly placed him in the first rank of military surgeons, and accomplished a large amount of good in the medical department of the Army. In after-life, the same qualities, strengthened by success, ensured great influence for what he taught, gained for him a large private practice in surgery, and made him a man much to be considered in all the questions of professional interest in which he was engaged. His influence on the progress of medical science in his own time was that of an earnest advocate and an attractive teacher of whatever appeared simple and straightforward in practice, and of all surgical doctrines that professed to be based upon correct anatomy. In the future history of surgery, he will be remembered for his advocacy of the use of nitrate of silver in purulent ophthalmia, of large incisions in phlegmonous erysipelas, of acid escharotics in sloughing phagedæna, and for the skill and boldness of his treatment of gun-shot wounds. But, especially, his name will probably be always mentioned with honour for his maintenance of the general necessity of tying wounded arteries at the very seat of injury, above and below the opening. The usual practice had been to tie the artery at some convenient part above the wound, on the assumption that the arrest or diminished force of the circulation would allow the firm closure of the wound, as it does the obliteration of an aneurismal sac. Few things in modern surgical works are equal in strength and clearness to the chapters in which Mr. Guthrie proved the error of such an assumption, and the advantages of his own mode of practice. In anatomy, his best work was the bringing to general knowledge the musculi compressores urethra, which, though described by Santorini, had nearly ceased to be recognized. In the medical department of the Army, his influence for good was undoubtedly considerable. It may be difficult to enumerate the improvements that were due to him; but, as the last edition of his best work the 'Commentaries on the Surgery of the War'-will prove, he was to the very end of life urgent in promoting the efficiency of military hospital-establishments, and in maintaining the reputation of the medical officers of the Army.

DANIEL SHARPE was born in London in 1806. His mother, who died a few weeks after his birth, was sister to Samuel Rogers the poet. He was educated at Walthamstow, and as a boy early showed a taste for the study of natural history, but he did not commence seriously to work at geology till he was admitted a Fellow of the Geological Society in June 1829. In the same year he gave his first memoir to the Society, "On a new species of Ichthyosaurus, &c."-I. grandipes-which, however, it afterwards appeared, had been previously described by Conybeare, under the name of I. tenuirostris.

Throughout the greater part of his life Mr. Sharpe was actively engaged as a merchant, and his business connexion with the winegrowing districts of Portugal occasionally leading him there, in 1832, 1839, 1848 and 1849 he gave to the Geological Society a series of memoirs on the rocks in the neighbourhood of Lisbon and Oporto. The first is a mere sketch of the general arrangement of the Tertiary and Secondary rocks by a young and intelligent geologist ;the second, on the same subject, is fuller and more definite, but not sufficiently complete in the determination of fossils to fix the precise age of the strata described. It contains, however, in an appendix, some observations of great value on the comparative effects of the great earthquake of 1755 on the strata on which Lisbon stands. The destructive effects of this shock were chiefly confined to the area occupied by the soft tertiary beds, while the buildings erected on the more solid Hippurite limestone and chalk escaped entirely. The line of division between the shattered and entire buildings corresponded precisely with the boundaries of the strata. This subject has since been elaborated by Mr. Mallet in his Reports on Earthquakes to the British Association. In his third memoir Mr. Sharpe describes the granitic, gneissic, clay-slate and coal-bearing rocks of Vallongo near Oporto. The clay-slate he proved by its fossils to be of Lower Silurian age, and his sections show that the strata bearing anthracitic coal underlie the slate, and rest on gneiss pierced by granite. He thence concluded that the coal is of Lower Silurian age. In the present state of knowledge regarding that country, it is impossible to deny that this may be the case, but it must be remembered that the few remains of plants discovered in these strata are considered by palæontologists to present characters indicative of "Carboniferous"

age; and even those geologists who most strenuously support the so-called uniformitarian doctrines, incline to attribute the peculiar position of the coal to one of those great inversions of the strata so frequent in highly disturbed districts of all ages, from Palæozoic up to Tertiary times.

The fourth paper commences with a succinct sketch of the general geology of Portugal, and goes on to define the limits of the secondary rocks north of the Tagus, both by stratigraphical and palæontological evidence. Long before this paper was read, Mr. Sharpe had acquired much critical skill and knowledge as a palæontologist, and on palæontological principles he now established the existence of Cretaceous and Jurassic rocks in the country described. The whole formed an excellent sketch of a hitherto undescribed country, and up to this date British geologists are chiefly indebted to these memoirs for the knowledge they possess of a land where the science is almost uncultivated.

Between 1842 and 1844 Mr. Sharpe gave four memoirs to the Geological Society on the Silurian and Old Red Sandstone Rocks of Wales and the North of England, territories previously chiefly illustrated by the labours of Professor Sedgwick. The first of these is "On the Geology of the South of Westmoreland." Part of this paper describes the range of the Coniston limestone. Mr. Sharpe identified it by its fossils as forming part of the Lower Silurian series, but did not determine its actual horizon. In 1839 Mr. Marshall placed it on the parallel of the Caradoc sandstone, which determination the researches of later geologists have sustained.

Mr. Sharpe also pointed out the unconformity of the Upper on the Lower Silurian rocks of the area; and in describing the passage of the Ludlow rocks into the Old Red Sandstone, he correctly infers that the Tilestones of South Wales should be withdrawn from the base of the Old Red Sandstone and classified with the Ludlow rocks, to which their fossils unite them. At a later period of the same year he produced a memoir "On the Bala Limestone, and other portions of the Older Palæozoic Rocks of North Wales." Up to this date it was believed that at Bala and elsewhere there was a great thickness of fossiliferous Upper Cambrian rocks below the Lower Silurian strata. Mr. Sharpe maintained that this was an error, and that both stratigraphically, and by their fossils, the Bala rocks were the equi