X 



^6 PROCEEDINGS or THE 



became Governor of Barbados, in 1892 High Commissioner in 

 Cyprus, and in 1898 Governor of British Guiana, from which he 

 retired in 1901. At the time of his death, on 1st May, 1904, in 

 London, of congestion of the lungs, he was Chairman of the 

 Charity Organization Society. He was elected Fellow of the 

 Linnean Society on 3rd December, 1891. 



Isaac Cooke Thompson was born July 27, 1843, became a 

 Fellow of the Linnean Society Dec. 1, 1887; died Nov. 6, 1903. 

 ]le was a chemist by profession and a naturalist from his 

 boyhood. As a young man he attended classes in science at the 

 Liverpool Royal Infirmary School of Medicine, distinguishing 

 himself by liis attainments in botany, and industriously forming a 

 large herbarium of local jjlants, for wliicli he obtained a special 

 prize. In those days he would walk fifty or sixty miles a day in 

 search of rare specimens, and being a teetotaler he accomplished 

 these long distances without recourse to stimulants. He was a 

 great traveller by land and sea ; an ardent hill-climber, ascending 

 Mont Blanc and Monte Eosa in 1868 ; a vigorous athlete in many 

 exercises, with a special devotion to swimming. " It \^'as his 

 regular custom, \\hen on scientific expeditions at Pufiiu Island or 

 Port Erin, to begin the day with a plunge and a swim before 

 breakfast, and no weather deterred him." Professor Herdman, 

 fi'om whose memoir most of these facts are taken, " has been 

 I'outed out of bed and conveyed off to bathe by his friend more 

 than once in December and January, over ground covered with 

 snow.'' One may perhaps sorrowfully reflect that Thompson trusted 

 too far to an iron constitution, and made demands upon it beyond 

 what even the most rigid temperance in other respects could 

 justify. His mental activity matched his physical powers of 

 endurance. Thirty years ago he was already an accomplished 

 microscopist. He held successively the posts of Secretary and 

 President of the Liverpool Microscopical Society, coming to be 

 recognized, in succession to Dalliuger and Drysdale, as the leading 

 local authority on the microscope. 



Along with Herdman, A. O. Walker, and others, Thompson was 

 one of the founders of the Liverpool Biological Society and its 

 Marine Biology Committee. "It is in connection with the latter, 

 and during the last twenty years, that most of his original scientific 

 work has been done." In that period he "acquired a wide 

 acquaintance Avith the Crustacea, aiid an intimate detailed know- 

 ledge of the Copepoda and some allied groups of Entoraostraca." 

 His " Copepoda of Madeira and the Canary Islands, with de- 

 scriptions of new genera and species," was published in our own 

 Journal in 1900 (vol. xx.), but, as was natural, a long series of 

 his papers appeared in the Transactions of the Liverpool Biological 

 Society. From time to time the Journals and Proceedings of 

 other Societies contained essays from his pen, generally on the 



