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The Scottish Naturalist 



Nos. 89 AND 90.] 1919 [May-June. 



3n nDeinoriain. 



WILLIAM DENISON ROEBUCK, M.Sc, F.L.S. 



We greatly regret to record the death, in the sixty-ninth year 

 of his age, of William Denison Roebuck, which took place in 

 his native city of Leeds on the 15th of February. Mr 

 Roebuck was best known to our readers as the author of the 

 valuable series of papers which have appeared in this 

 magazine on the distribution of Mollusca in Scotland. The 

 scene, however, of his activities as a naturalist was the 

 county of York, where no man past or present has done so 

 much for the systematic investigation of Fauna and Flora of 

 that great county. In 1876 Mr Roebuck was appointed 

 honorary secretary of the newly formed Yorkshire Naturalists' 

 Union a federation of over forty local societies with a total 

 membership of several thousands an office which he held 

 for thirty years. During the whole of this period he was 

 indefatigable, and, thanks to his labours and his great powers 

 of organisation, the Union became the leading organisation 

 of its kind in Great Britain. His knowledge, too, of the 

 literature of British zoology was remarkably wide and of 

 great value to those engaged in systematic and field work. 

 In addition to being the author of numerous papers on 

 insects, shells, and mammals, he was a joint author of the 

 Yorkshire Vertebrata in 1881, and editor of The Naturalist 

 89 AND 90 I 



