fic observer has been attested and recognised by his admission
into the various learned societies, foremost among which may be
mentioned the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London; and we need
scarcely say that whether as councillor, vice-president, or president,
the Glasgow Philosophical Society has no more active supporter than he.
What the members of the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen think of
his qualities as a man of judgment and discretion is well evidenced by
the fact of their selection of him once and again as their
representative in the General Council of Medical Education and
Registration of the United Kingdom, an office fraught, we are led to
believe, with cares and duties of the highest social importance.

At the late meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh, Dr. Thomson
rather startled the scientific world by an address delivered in the
Biological Section, in which he characterised the so-called new science
of spiritualism as the invention of impostors and mountebanks. His
address, which lacked the author's constitutional caution and
discretion, was severely handled in several of the leading journals, and
a trenchant pen, in an Edinburgh cotemporary, "cut up rough" with a
vengeance. Among others who replied to Dr. Thomson's strictures was Dr.
Robert H. Collyer, of London, who claims to be the original discoverer
of electro-biology, phreno-magnetism, and stupefaction, by the
inhalation of narcotic and anaesthetic vapours. In the course of his
address, Dr. Thomson spoke as follows:--"It must be admitted that
extremely curious and rare, and to those who are not acquainted with
nervous phenomena, apparently marvellous phenomena, present themselves
in peculiar states of the nervous system--some of which states may be
induced through the mind, and may be made more and more liable to recur,
and greatly exaggerated by frequent repetition. But making the fullest
allowance for all these conditions, it is still surprising that persons,
otherwise appearing to be within the bounds of sanity, should entertain
a confirmed belief in the possibility of phenomena, which, while they
are at variance with the best established physical laws, have never been
brought under proof by the evidences of the senses, and are opposed to
the dictates of sound judgment. It is so far satisfactory in the
interests of true biological science that no man of note can be named
from the long list of thoroughly well-informed anatomists