OUR PORTRAIT GALLERY.

SECOND SERIES.-No. 41.

SIR CHARLES WYVILLE THOMSON, LL.D., F.R.SS.L. and E., F.L.S., F.G.S., &c., &c., &c.,

Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh.

OUR portrait this month is that of Sir Charles Wyville Thomson, F.R.S., the eminent naturalist who was recently at the head of the scientific department of the famous Challenger Expedition. His long residence in Ireland will make our sketch of him one of special interest to our Irish readers. His brilliant scientific discoveries, though they have as yet been given to the public only in a partial and fragmentary form, place him in the very first rank among European physicists and biologists.

Charles Wyville Thomson is descended from an old and well-known Scotch family, which has long been settled at Bonsyde, in Linlithgowshire. His great grandfather was the Principal Clerk of Chancery in Scotland in the middle of the eighteenth century; his grandfather was a distinguished Edinburgh clergyman; and his father was a surgeon in the service of the East India Company.

The subject of our memoir was born at Bonsyde on March 5, 1830. He was educated first at Merchiston Academy, a high class school which has long flourished in the venerable mansion that gave birth to the inventor of logarithms, and afterwards at the University of Edinburgh.

He was intended for the medical profession, but he early discovered a strong inclination towards those branches of medical study which are more immediately connected with the natural sciences; and his proficiency in botany was such, that in 1850, when only twenty years of age, he was appointed Lecturer on Botany in King's College, Aberdeen. This appointment, accepted originally with the view of obtaining a year's respite from university studies which had been prosecuted so arduously