William Benjamin Carpenter, MD   William Benjamin Carpenter, leading light among early naturalists, was born in Exeter on 29 October 1813, and died in London19 November 1885. He attended his father's school in Bristol, and then apprenticed himself to local medical man John Bishop Estlin. Carpenter saw the West Indies as a companion to a patient, then in 1835 entered University College, London and the Royal College of Surgeons for formal training of his own. His M.D. finally came from the University of Edinburgh in 1839. This he took to Bristol, to try clinical medicine for a few years, but decamped quickly for London, to take up academic appointments at University College, the Royal Institution, and the London Hospital. For the next four decades he researched and published prodigiously, in fields as far apart as mental physiology, microscopy, marine biology, and religion. He was justly influential. His first contribution was on the function of the ventral cord ganglia of the arthropods. His next was a controversial notion of "unconscious cerebration", in which the physiology of thought and feeling takes place in the brain. Colleagues who disapproved of "Brain-change" postulated reflex actions to stimuli elsewhere in the body instead. Following one corollary of Brain-change, Carpenter prefigured Pavlovian behaviourists, thinking it possible to train animals and children with a battery of the right "motives". Thinking in wider terms, he found he could lend most of his weight to Darwin and his evolutionary principles, which pleased Darwin very much. He also did a great deal to elevate the teaching of science in universities, and, with the famous Gilchrist lectures, to extend science to the very working classes. His later achievements were in marine zoology, where he described and classified the Foraminifera, ancient and living, laid out a pioneering doctrine of general oceanic circulation, and read a series of startling papers on the animal nature of Eozoon canadense. Dr Carpenter, erstwhile clinician, founded a Marine Biological Assocation, with a productive laboratory on Plymouth Sound.   Johannes Muller was the physiologist who translated Carpenter's influental graduate thesis in 1840, on the invertebrate ventral cord ganglia. Thomas Laycock was the physiologist who claimed priority in the idea of Brain-change. John Stuart Mill affirmed the reasonableness of Brain-change as a physiological construct; Sir William Hamilton thought it made better sense metaphysically. Charles Darwin was gratified by Carpenter's overall approval of his principles of natural selection. The educationalist Herbert Spencer welcomed Carpenter's ideas on the teaching of science. Charles Wyville Thomson, Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, collaborated with Carpenter in dredging operations off the Scottish and Irish coasts, and in publishing their findings on the Crinoidea. The two men also worked together in planning the government-sponsored scientific voyage of H.M.S. Challenger (1873-1876). Carpenter's younger brother, Philip Pearsall, was a famous conchologist. One of the five sons produced by Carpenter's marriage to Louisa Powell in 1840 was Philip Herbert, a master at Eton and a zoologist, who assisted his father and wrote extensively on fossils himself.   _______________   WILLIAM BENJAMIN CARPENTER - Famous English Physiologist and Naturalist   He worked hard as investigator, author, editor, demonstrator and lecturer throughout his life; but it was his researches in marine zoology, notably in the "lower" organisms, as Foraminifera and Crinoids, that were most valuable. These researches gave an impetus to deep-sea exploration, an outcome of which was in 1868 the oceanographic survey with HMS Lightning and later the more famous Challenger Expedition.  He was awarded the Royal Medal in 1861. Carpenter's most famous work is the 1853 "Use and Abuse of Alcoholic Liquors" which was one of the first temperance books (Washingtonian Movement) to promote the fact that alcoholism is a disease. Carpenter gave qualified support to Darwin but he had reservations as to the application of evolution to man's intellectual and spiritual nature.