Though Glasgow has long been somewhat over-shadowed, in matters medical, by the superior fame of Edinburgh, it is nevertheless worthy of remark that at no period have her medical schools, whether intra-academical or extra-academical, been without teachers of high excellence. The Hamiltons, the brothers Burns, Jeffrey, Millar, Thomson, M'Kenzie, Lawrie, M'Grigor, Graham, Hunter, and Pagan were men all who would have shone with a bright lustre in any sphere, and when we instance Harry Rainy, Andrew Buchanan, and Allen Thomson as a few who are still with us, we say enough to show that the mantles of those that have passed the fatal bourne have fallen on no unworthy successors. The cynosure, however, just now, in our faculty of medicine, would seem, by general consent, to be Dr. Allen Thomson. And there is reason for this. His able, trustworthy researches in microscopic science have gained for him a European reputation—as a teacher of anatomy he is rivalled by few, if any, in the kingdom—as a member of the Academical Senate he is a most energetic promoter of the welfare of our time-honoured University—while as a citizen he is ever the warm and judicious supporter of all measures calculated to forward the social prosperity of our great and still-increasing civic community. Dr. Thomson was born in Edinburgh in 1809. His father was Dr. John Thomson, one of the most eminent metropolitan practitioners of his day; his mother was Margaret, a daughter of the late Professor John Millar, of this city, one of the most attractive expounders of jurisprudence of the period, and well-known as the author of various treatises of acknowledged excellence on "Ranks," "Government," and other departments of constitutional law. Dr. John Thomson was in many respects a very remarkable man. When upwards of twenty years of age, he might have been seen in his father's factory in Paisley, working at the loom as a silk-weaver; when he died, which was in his eighty-second year, he was Professor of General Pathology in the University of Edinburgh. In proof of the extent of his attainments, it may be stated that besides being the author, editor, and translator of a variety of publications, some of which may be perused with advantage even at the present hour, he delivered at one time or other during his professional career, courses of lectures on chemistry, pharmacy, surgery, military surgery, diseases of the eye, practice of physic, and general pathology. Besides professional friends in nearly all quarters of the world, he could number among his intimate associates Brougham, Horner, Jeffrey, Pillans, Thomas Thomson, and John Allen, afterwards private secretary and confidential friend of the late Lord Holland—friendships which, no doubt, account readily for the appearance of certain of the productions of his unresting pen on medical topics in the earlier numbers of the Edinburgh Review. We presume that it was to his long, warmly-cherished intimacy with Mr. Allen that his younger son, the subject of the present sketch, stands indebted for the baptismal name he bears. Dr. John Gordon, who, half-a-century ago, was looked upon as one of the brightest and most promising ornaments of the Edinburgh Extra Academical Medical School, and whose early death was felt to be almost a public loss, was among his earlier favourite pupils; the late Sir James Simpson was one of the last. Dr. Thomson was from his youth quite a helluo librorum, and up to the close of a busy, laborious life, was a keen student and admirer of the ancient classical literature of his honourable profession. When an old man, it was no uncommon sight to see him whiling away a leisure hour with a well-thumbed Greek copy of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates for his sofa companion. In a home so graced by all the amenities of lettered and scientific tastes, the subject of these remarks could not but enjoy, when a youth, many and great educational advantages. The tutorial shortcomings, if such there were, whether of High School or College, could not fail to be amply supplemented beside a domestic hearth predominated over by a father possessed of such force of character and well-garnered experience. As a student of medicine, Dr. Thomson held a distinguished place among his contemporaries, a circumstance which in due time earned for him the laurel-crown of Edinburgh studenthood, in the form of a presidency of the Royal Medical Society—a post of honour which had been occupied by his venerable father also, a quarter of a century before. His curriculum of professional study completed, and the necessary examinations passed, he obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine from the University of Edinburgh in 1830. At this time it was yet the rule for the aspiring candidate, ere he could secure the longed-for degree, to compose and defend a Latin thesis drawn from some department or other of medical science, and this, like his fellows, had Dr. Thomson to do. "De Evolutione Cordis Animalibus Vertebratis," was the title of his dissertation, a subject wide as the poles apart from the customary jejune hackneyed topics figuring on such an occasion, and, at this period, one of all others, we would imagine, where learned professors, if modest men, would in all probability be the pupils, and the trembling candidate the instructor. It would appear from this that microscopic embryology has been with Dr. Thomson a favourite field of study and research from his youth upwards. The inaugural dissertation was, however, but a brief antepast of something more exhaustive to follow. In the same year in which he took his degree, we find him coming before the scientific world through the medium of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, with a series of elaborate papers, entitled "The Development of the Vascular System in the Foetus in Vertebrated Animals," a contribution which is admitted on all hands, we believe, to be perhaps the highest and safest authority on its intricate and recondite subject-matter that as yet exists. We are not aware whether Dr. Thomson entered on the study of medicine with any view of going into the arduous and often unremunerative toils of private practice. If so, the idea must have been soon abandoned, as we have him, in 1832, becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, and thereafter betaking himself, as an extra academical lecturer, to the teaching of the Institutes of Medicine. The labours of the class-room would seem, however, not to have in any way overtasked his energies, as we find that in the same year he was again before the public as an author. The publication which saw the light on this occasion was an "Essay on the Formation of New Blood Vessels in Health and Disease," a subject at once full of practical interest to both physician and surgeon, and a most natural supplement to the magnum opus on the development of the vascular system. The same period, too, occasionally found Dr. Thomson not unwilling to appear before lay audiences with lucid, instructive expositions of the structure and functions of our wonderfully-made frame—a fact, we daresay, of which many middle-aged citizens of Edinburgh will, even still, retain a pleasing recollection. As regards his professional courses on physiology, these he continued to deliver up to 1836, when the removal of his colleague and intimate friend, Dr. Sharpey, from Edinburgh to the Chair of Anatomy and Physiology of the London University College, induced him to open classes for extra-mural students of anatomy, at that time a somewhat numerous body in the northern metropolis. As prelections and demonstrations on this fundamental important branch of medical study formed the daily vocation, at the period spoken of, of not less than three or four private lecturers—as they were termed—we can well imagine that the labours of Dr. Thomson, at this point of his career, would by no means be light. In 1839, however, a partial reward for his anxieties and toils came in the shape of an appointment to the Chair of Anatomy in Marischal College, Aberdeen, a situation which he had filled for three years, when he was recalled to the University of his native city to take the place of the late venerable and widely-venerated Professor Alison. The year which saw Dr. Thomson transferred to the granite city saw also a valuable contribution from his pen in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, "On the Development of the Human Embryo," an elementary nucleus, among others, of a series of specially luminous articles by him on "Circulation," "Generation," and "Ovum," which afterwards appeared in "Todd's CyclopediÆ of Anatomy and Physiology." After a six years' incumbency as Professor of Physiology in the University of Edinburgh, he was, in 1848, presented by the Crown to the Chair of Anatomy in Glasgow University, at that time vacant in consequence of the death of Dr. James Jeffrey, who formerly had been its occupant for the long period of 58 years. On coming to Glasgow, he soon gave lively proofs that the important situation which he had been brought to fill would, in his hands, be anything other than a sinecure. In his opening address he modestly promised that he would do his best to preserve the fame which the place had acquired under his predecessors, and amply has he fulfilled the pledge. We are led to understand that, alike in lecture-room and laboratory, everything is carried on with spirit, decorum, and order, and that what with the efficiency of the prelections and examinations, aided as these are by a profusion of admirably executed pictorial illustrations, many of them drawn by the lecturer himself, the place is, in point of usefulness, outstripped by no anatomical theatre anywhere, whether at home or abroad. As a lecturer Dr. Thomson possesses many points of excellence. He is singularly lucid in his arrangement of his topics, and what he thus arranges so well is always stated in language at once impressive and perspicuous, while over all there is a quiet self-possession which has a never-failing power in subduing pupils, however buoyant or wayward. Dr. Thomson's eminence as a scientific observer has been attested and recognised by his admission into the various learned societies, foremost among which may be mentioned the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London; and we need scarcely say that whether as councillor, vice-president, or president, the Glasgow Philosophical Society has no more active supporter than he. What the members of the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen think of his qualities as a man of judgment and discretion is well evidenced by the fact of their selection of him once and again as their representative in the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom, an office fraught, we are led to believe, with cares and duties of the highest social importance.

At the late meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh, Dr. Thomson rather startled the scientific world by an address delivered in the Biological Section, in which he characterised the so-called new science of spiritualism as the invention of impostors and mountebanks. His address, which lacked the author's constitutional caution and discretion, was severely handled in several of the leading journals, and a trenchant pen, in an Edinburgh cotemporary, "cut up rough" with a vengeance. Among others who replied to Dr. Thomson's strictures was Dr. Robert H. Collyer, of London, who claims to be the original discoverer of electro-biology, phreno-magnetism, and stupefaction, by the inhalation of narcotic and anÆsthetic vapours. In the course of his address, Dr. Thomson spoke as follows:—"It must be admitted that extremely curious and rare, and to those who are not acquainted with nervous phenomena, apparently marvellous phenomena, present themselves in peculiar states of the nervous system—some of which states may be induced through the mind, and may be made more and more liable to recur, and greatly exaggerated by frequent repetition. But making the fullest allowance for all these conditions, it is still surprising that persons, otherwise appearing to be within the bounds of sanity, should entertain a confirmed belief in the possibility of phenomena, which, while they are at variance with the best established physical laws, have never been brought under proof by the evidences of the senses, and are opposed to the dictates of sound judgment. It is so far satisfactory in the interests of true biological science that no man of note can be named from the long list of thoroughly well-informed anatomists and physiologists, who has not treated the belief in the separate existence of powers of animal magnetism and spiritualism as wild speculations, devoid of all foundation in the carefully-tested observation of facts. It has been the habit of the votaries of these systems to assert that scientific men have neglected or declined to investigate the phenomena with attention and candour; but nothing can be farther from the truth. From time to time men of eminence, and fully competent, by their knowledge of biological phenomena, and their skill and accuracy in conducting scientific investigation, have made the most patient and careful examination of the evidence placed before them by the professed believers and practitioners of so-called magnetic, phreno-magnetic, electro-biological, and spiritualistic phenomena; and the result has been uniformly the same in all cases when they were permitted to secure conditions by which the reality of the phenomena, or the justice of their interpretation, could be tested—viz., either that the experiments signally failed to educe the results professed, or that the experimenters were detected in the most shameless and determined impostures." This sentence fell among the savants like a bomb, and "great was the fall thereof." Some have described it as an ad captandum vulgus use of words, and others have called it rash, and unduly sceptical. It is proverbial that doctors disagree, and it would be wonderful indeed if they were of one mind on the mysterious phenomena of spiritualism.

It would be unpardonable were we to omit reference to Dr. Allen Thomson's great exertions on behalf of the new University. No member of the Senate was more zealous and hard-working in raising the necessary funds for the splendid edifice that now rests on Gilmorehill, and Professor Thomson was suitably selected to cut the first sod some four years ago, when the work of erection was commenced.

Like his father, Dr. Allen Thomson has all his life been a consistent Whig in politics, although in political movements, as such, he has never taken any very prominent part.

In August last Dr. Thomson received from his Alma Mater the degree of LL.D.