By the autumn of 1807, his note as a surgeon had grown, and patients became numerous. His lectures on surgery, too, became an unqualified success, though the number of paying pupils was small. In 1808, however, he had thirty-six pupils. His studies for his lectures were most faithfully and zealously prosecuted. His lectures were most original: his discoveries were given step by step to his class-pupils. The first record of his results in regard to the nervous system is in a letter of 26th November 1807, when he writes: “I have done a more interesting _nova anatomia cerebri humani_ than it is possible to conceive.” This developed gradually into an introduction to the Nervous System, which was shown to many in manuscript. Meanwhile the Professorship of Anatomy at the Royal Academy was about to become vacant, and Mr. Bell’s candidature was warmly advocated by many of the most eminent surgeons and artists. Abernethy desisted from the idea of candidature in his favour. Wilson was dissuaded from competing. Sir Astley Cooper wrote a letter stating that he beyond all comparison merited the post, and would be an invaluable acquisition to the Royal Academy. But in the end, Mr., afterward Sir Anthony, Carlisle was elected, and lectured to but four pupils in his first course. It is to be remembered that even at hospitals, lectures were by no means common things at this time. Several of the most eminent hospital surgeons did not lecture at all, or only lectured occasionally. So that Bell’s class of thirty-six was really a first-rate one. A mark of his original and painstaking mode of making progress was seen in the visit he paid to Haslar Hospital, when the wounded soldiers from Corunna arrived home, in January 1809. The scene was a most striking and impressive one to his feeling nature. “I have stooped,” he says, “over hundreds of wretches in the most striking variety of woe and misery, picking out the wounded. Each day as I awake, still I see the long line of sick and lame slowly moving from the beach: it seems to have no end. There is something in the interrupted and very slow motion of these distant objects singularly affecting.” From the cases he saw he gained much; and laid the foundation of his essay on Gunshot Wounds, appended to the second edition of his “Operative Surgery.” In 1810 Charles Bell became engaged to his future wife, Marion Shaw, whose sister Barbara had for some years been married to his brother George. Their brothers, John and Alexander, became Charles Bell’s pupils and assistants. In writing to Miss Shaw at one time Mr. Bell revealed to her much of the sadness and melancholy of his first years in London, oppressed by the consciousness of not occupying a position corresponding to his talents, and finding everywhere difficulties. “Many and many a time in the prosecution of my plans of life have I wished that I were with the armies, to rid myself of the load of life without discredit.” He was married on the 3d of June, 1811.