The character of MARSHALL HALL, who divides with Sir Charles Bell the principal honours of discovery as to the nervous system, presents a contrast to his in that it displays a mind more minutely active, and more distinctly medical in its tone, combined with a marvellous degree of detailed benevolence. Thus Hall’s reputation has, like Harvey’s and John Hunter’s, grown largely since his death. Marshall Hall was born at Basford near Nottingham on February 18, 1790, his father, Robert Hall, having been a cotton manufacturer and bleacher of ingenuity and originality. He first employed chlorine as a bleaching agent on a large scale, his earliest attempts having procured for his establishment the epithet of “Bedlam.” He was of a very religious turn, too, being one of the early Wesleyans. The strict but benevolent piety of his father, and the sweet and gentle disposition of his mother, were favourable to the growth of high morality, strict conscientiousness, and amiability of character in their family, while the inventive ability of the father reproduced itself in his second son, Samuel Hall, a prolific inventor, and no less in his sixth son, Marshall. It is not often that a typically good and inoffensive son has turned out so conspicuously original in his work. But he had a saving fondness for boyish literature such as Robinson Crusoe, and was full of fun and playfulness. He was early sent to Nottingham to school with the Rev. J. Blanchard, the instructor of Kirke White. Here he did not even learn Latin, although his elder brothers had had classical instruction. French appears to have been his only linguistic attainment: and the chief fact recorded of his school-days is his thrashing a tyrannical “big boy” in the school. But school was over for him at the age of 14, and he was placed with a chemist at Newark. Soon finding his position irksome, his friendship with a youth who was preparing for a medical career led him to long for a similar course, and ultimately his father was induced to send him to Edinburgh, whither he went in October 1809. He had already indicated his future eminence by rising very early to study medicine and chemistry, and giving as his reason: “I am determined to be a great man.”