OBITUARY. 



THE present year, 1886, has a melancholy interest to Natural- 

 ists in Scotland because of the death within three months 

 of three men who had distinguished themselves by the assiduity 

 and success with which they pursued the study of the natural pro- 

 ducts of Scotland. All of them were keen observers, and all have 

 by their observations advanced in no small degree those branches of 

 science to which they most devoted themselves. Probably few 

 biographies are read with greater interest than that of Thomas 

 Edward, A.L.S., of Banff. Scarcely less interesting is that of 

 Charles William Peach, A.L.S., as told in Smiles' " Robert 

 Dick, Baker of Thurso." Both published occasional papers ; but 

 the real value of their work can best be judged by references to 

 such books as Murchison's " Siluria," Bate and Westwood's " Brit- 

 ish Sessile-eyed Crustacea," and others, in which the authors ac- 

 knowledge their debt for information supplied by one or both of 

 these naturalists. Not less meritorious as an observer, but with a 

 better basis of education to build on, and giving great promise of 

 eminence in the critical investigation of the Scotch flora, was 

 Abraham Sturrock, whose premature death gives cause to lament 

 the loss of one from whose labours valuable results were to be 

 looked for. 



Charles William Peach was born at Wansford in North- 

 amptonshire in 1800. His father was then a saddler, but sub- 

 sequently became an inn-keeper. As a child Peach was taught in 

 a dame's school, and afterwards in the village school, taught, or 

 rather not taught, by a sawyer who had had to give up his trade of 

 sawyer and had taken to teaching. When twelve, Peach was sent 

 to school in Lincolnshire ; there he remained till he reached the 

 age of fifteen, when he left school finally, and returned to help 

 with the work of the inn. In 1824, he got a post as private in the 

 coast-guard at Weybourn in Norfolk. He had not previously seen 

 the sea. A very fine example of a zoophyte (Anlennularia 



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