MEIGS, James Aitken, physician, born in Philadelphia, 31 July, 1829; died there, 9 November, 1879. He was graduated at the Central high-school of Philadelphia in 1848, and at the Jefferson medical college in 1851, and practised in his native city until his death. His first collegiate appointment was that of assistant to the chair of physiology in the Pennsylvania medical college. In 1854-'62 he was lecturer on climatology and physiology at Franklin institute, and also lectured frequently on physiological and ethnological subjects elsewhere in Philadelphia. He was professor of the institutes of medicine in Philadelphia college of medicine and surgery in 1857-'9, and was then transferred to the similar chair in the Pennsylvania medical college. About this time he delivered two systematic courses in physiology, illustrating them with an extensive series of vivisectal demonstrations, which attracted much attention from the fact that until that time no systematic effort had been made to teach physiology experimentally in any of the medical colleges of Philadelphia. During the civil war he devoted himself exclusively to practice, resigning from his professorships, but in June. 1866, he delivered a series of lectures on the physiology and pathology of the blood and circulation at Jefferson medical college, and in 1868 became professor of the institutes of medicine and medical jurisprudence there. He was physician to the department of diseases of the chest in Howard hospital and infirmary for incurables in 1855-'68, and was appointed physician of the Pennsylvania hospital in 1868. Dr. Meigs was a member of medical societies in the United States and Europe, and was president of the Philadelphia county medical society in 1871, also librarian of the Philadelphia academy of natural sciences in 1856-'9, and a delegate to the International medical congress in Philadelphia in 1876. His bibliography was extensive, and was chiefly devoted to ethnological -and craniological subjects. He prepared an appendix for the first American edition of William B. Carpenter's " Microscope and its Revelations" (Philadelphia, 18,56); and the article on " The Cranial Characteristics of the Races of Men" in Nott and Glydden's "Indigenous Races of the Earth" (1857); and he also edited an American edition of Kirke's "Manual of Physiology " (1857).