l64 NATURAL SCIENCE. March. 



Darwin. 

 Meanwhile the bidding to "praise famous men" is not being 

 forgotten by Englishmen. The inhabitants of Shrewsbury, in which 

 town Charles Darwin's father practised as a physician and where he 

 himself was born, have, in a numerously-attended public meeting, 

 determined to establish some memorial of the great naturalist. At 

 present nothing definite has been decided, as it was felt that the 

 memorial should not be merely local but national and indeed \vorld- 

 wide. A committee has therefore been appointed to make arrange- 

 ments for a public meeting of scientific men and others interested in 

 the object, which meeting it is hoped to hold early in March. Any- 

 one who wishes to attend the meeting should communicate with 

 Mr. H. C. Clarke, Tow^n Clerk's Office, Shrewsbury. The suggestions 

 already made are mainly three : — First, to place a bronze statue of 

 Darwin in front of the old school buildings, which are now used for 

 a public library and museum ; no more appropriate site could be 

 imagined. Second, to found some scholarship in connection with 

 Shrewsbury School ; if the intention be to encourage science, we 

 would suggest that the scholarship should be given to boys on leaving 

 rather than on entering the school. Third, to erect and endow in 

 Shrewsbury a hall for technical and scientific teaching. All schemes 

 are excellent, but the last seems a little ambitious; a combination of 

 the two former seems most likely to meet with general approval. 

 However tliis may be, we wish all success to the good people of 

 Shrewsbury, believing that such public and visible honour to great 

 workers in science will stir future youth to follow their example. 



Harvard Museum and Scientific Co-operation. 



Mention of "the Pope of Jena," as Haeckel has been bitingly 

 nicknamed by his eminent opponent in " plankton " controversies, 

 Alexander Agassiz, reminds us that we have received the annual 

 report of the latter as Curator of the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology at Harvard College. Unlike most museum reports, these 

 publications of Professor Agassiz always prove very interesting 

 reading, and this seems to us to arise from the fact that this Museum 

 is not merely a place for the storing of specimens, valuable though 

 its collections are, but is a growing and living institution actively 

 connected with the acquisition of fresh knowledge in all branches of 

 biological and geological research, and with the imparting of that 

 knowledge to eager classes of university students as well as to the 

 larger public. In these respects a museum attached to a university, 

 with properly appointed laboratories and a staff of broad-minded 

 investigators, must always have some advantage over an establish- 

 ment that is a museum and nothing more. In museums of the latter 

 kind there is an inevitable tendency to ignore the philosophical 

 aspects of the natural history sciences and to exalt the purely 



