JOSEPH TOYNBEE was born in 1815, at Heckington, in Lincolnshire, his father having been a large farmer. After being for some years under a private tutor at home, he went to King’s Lynn Grammar School. At seventeen he was apprenticed to Mr. William Wade of the Westminster General Dispensary, Soho, and studied anatomy under Mr. Dermott. His assiduous and careful dissections were of essential benefit in preparing him for his lifelong minute dissections of the ear in health and disease. He further studied at St. George’s and at University College hospitals. Even during his student life aural studies powerfully attracted him, and as early as 1836 several letters of his under the initials J. T. appeared in the _Lancet_. In 1838 he became a member of the College of Surgeons, and was selected as assistant-curator of its museum under Professor Owen. He obtained the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1842 for researches demonstrating the non-vascularity of articular cartilage, the cornea, crystalline lens, vitreous humour, and epidermoid appendages, which were published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1841. Toynbee early entered upon aural practice in Argyll Place, becoming also one of the surgeons to the St. James’s and St. George’s Dispensary. He was included in the first list of Fellows of the College of Surgeons on the issue of its new charter. At the Dispensary he founded a Samaritan Fund for supplying the sick poor with necessaries of life and warmth. All sanitary matters were subjects of his profound interest, and he spent much time in improving the condition of things in the parishes around him, especially promoting means of securing adequate ventilation, and the erection of model lodging-houses near Broad Street, Golden Square. Toynbee’s practice gradually became very large, but he continued to dissect, and also to support administratively as well as pecuniarily many benevolent societies. He found that so little was really known of the diseases of the ear from actual dissection, that his only hope of framing a system of aural surgery was by personal and persevering examination and record of morbid specimens. This was carried on for more than twenty years, until he had dissected about 2000 human ears. Many of these were derived from his patients in the large Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, whose condition he had examined previously to their death. Many medical men also supplied him with specimens of diseased ears, as well as notes of cases. He further inquired closely into the history of very many cases of patients with diseased ears.