OBITUARY. 



GEORGE JOHN ROMANES. 

 Born May 26, 1848. Died June, 1894. 



PROFESSOR ROMANES was of Scotch extraction, and was 

 born in Canada in 1848. He was not a public schoolman, but 

 was educated at a succession of private schools, and by tutors in 

 London and abroad. He had a distinguished career at Cambridge, 

 and being possessed of private means, was able to devote himself to 

 research after his University career. This he did with so great success 

 that in 1873 he was Burney Prize Essayist, in 1875 Croonian Lec- 

 turer to the Royal Society, and in 1879 he attained to the fellowship 

 of the Royal Society. He was well known as a lecturer at the 

 Royal Institution, at Oxford, and at Edinburgh, but most people 

 came to know his name by his abundant contributions to periodical 

 literature. His many personal friends speak in the warmest manner 

 of his personal qualities, and everyone interested in biology regrets 

 his premature death. We do not profess to write with any great 

 private knowledge of him ; but we would call attention to the hand- 

 some tribute paid to his memory in the columns of Nature by Pro- 

 fessor Lankester, who was at once his friend and his controversial 

 opponent. 



Professor Romanes was a fertile and ingenious exponent of the 

 Darwinian theory, a critical and profound reasoner on biological 

 philosophy, and a brilliant investigator. His exposition of the orthodox 

 Darwinian theory, published under the title of " The Scientific 

 Evidences of Organic Evolution " in Macmillan's Nature Series, 

 is by far the most lucid, orderly, and simple publication on the 

 subject. The first volume of his " Darwin and after Darwin " 

 (Longmans, Green & Co., 1892) is a more detailed but equally 

 intelligible account of the same subject. In the multitude of books 

 written about or round about Darwinism these two writings of Pro- 

 fessor Romanes stand out by their correctness in detail, by their literary 

 merit, and luminous simplicity. 



His most notable original investigations were upon the nervous 

 systems of Star-fish and Medusae. These, for the most part, were con- 

 tributed to the Royal Society's Transactions, but afterwards a popular 

 resume of them was published as the volume on Jelly-fish, Star-fish, 

 and Sea-urchins in the International Scientific Series. The minutiae 

 of structure and histology did not attract his attention so much as 



