“One side of Sir William’s life deserves special notice, viz., his social influence, and the endeavour to popularise the great institution with which he was officially connected. These influences, developed at the Museum of the College of Surgeons with great success, were brought to bear on a much wider circle in connection with the National Museum and as President of the Zoological Society; and no one was more fitted than he—either for the courtly circle or the large gatherings of working men who flocked on Saturday afternoons to the galleries of the museum. In all his many and varied social functions in his prominent positions he was ably seconded by one who identified herself with his every engagement, and to whom his last volume of collected addresses was dedicated. A man of wide sympathies, he is found at one time addressing a Civil Service dinner, at another a Volunteer gathering, now descanting on evolution to a Church Congress, and again speaking at a Mayoral banquet, a girls’ school, or an industrial exhibition. The strain on his physique demanded by these efforts would have been great to an ordinary man, but it must have been serious to one whose main energies were heavily taxed by exhausting scientific work. His powerful constitution was thus slowly but surely sapped, yet to an eager mind and a generous heart, such as his, little heed was paid to himself.... “Taken all in all, we shall not soon see so talented and so accurate a comparative anatomist, so impressive a speaker, so facile an artist, or a public man with a higher type of character.” The zoological and anthropological side of Sir William’s work (with which the present writer is more competent to deal than he is with his social relations and character) is discussed at length in later chapters of this memoir; but a few observations may be here introduced on subjects which scarcely come within the category of purely scientific work.