A letter addressed to the Earl of Rosse, President-Elect of the Royal Society / by Marshall Hall.

  • Hall, Marshall, 1790-1857.
Date:
October 1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter addressed to the Earl of Rosse, President-Elect of the Royal Society / by Marshall Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    &C. &C. My Lord, I rejoice in your Lordship’s accession to the Pre¬ sidential chair of the Boyal Society, in the confident hope that you will not permit such wrongs as are described in the following appeal to be persisted in, in that hall of British science; an appeal which I pen entirely on a principle of duty, keenly regretting the necessity for speaking at all of myself and of my own labours. I put aside all further prefatory observations, and proceed at once to lay before your Lordship a plain and simple detail of facts, as briefly as possible. But there is one preliminary circumstance which I must mention. In 1831, I read a paper before the Boyal Society, entitled “ On the Anatomy and Physiology of the Minute and Capillary Vessels.” This paper contained the discovery and description of the intermediate blood-channels situated be¬ tween the minute arteries and minute veins, both in the pneu¬ monic and systemic circulations. It was rejected, and replaced by what I venture to designate, after the lapse of seventeen years, as utter error, by a member of the Council! It was during the investigation of that subject that I was struck, in 1831, with an extraordinary phenomenon. I ob¬ served that if the tip of the separated tail of the Triton be irritated by the point of a probe, that severed portion of the animal moved, assuming various curved and contorted forms.