LINXEAN SOCIETY OF LOXDOX. 53 



his reputation rests, to work of perhaps a less assured vakie, on the 

 micro-organisms o£ the Carboniferous Period. Though to the 

 popular mind researches on fossil Bacteria and their action 

 may seem of fascinating interest, it may be doubted whether 

 such investigations can ever lead to results sufficiently definite to 

 repaj' the immense labour which they demand. 



1-Jenault never received in his own country the official recognition 

 which his great work in a new field merited ; it is the more 

 satisfactory to us that his English colleagues did him such honour 

 as lay in their power. He was eh^cted a Poreign Member of our 

 Society 5th May, 1S96, and of the Royal Microscopical Society in 

 1904, only a few mouths before his death, vrhich took place on 

 16th October of that 3'ear. [D. H. Scott.] 



Alfred Sanders, M.E.C.S., was born 29th xipril, 1834, and died 

 14th February, 1905. He was elected a Pellow of the Linneau 

 and Zoological Societies in 1863, and from about this time, having 

 abandoned the practice of medicine, he devoted himself to a special 

 branch of natural history. Among papers contributed to various 

 societies, his principal essays \Aere those which appeared in the 

 ' Phil. Trans.' between the years 1879 and 1886, entitled 

 " Contributions to the Anatomy of the central nervous system in 

 Vertebrate Animals," of which parts 1 and 2 referred to the 

 Teleostei, part 3 to the Plagiostomi, a fourth paper treating 

 similarly of Ceratodus Forsterl in the Dipnoi. Prom yet another 

 group of fishes, the Cyclostomi, Myxine gliitlnosa furnished him 

 with the subject for a treatise published independently, and 

 accompanied by a very long list of the authorities who have been 

 attracted to discuss the unattractive personality of that worm-like 

 fish. 



Mr. Sanders is remembered at the Linneau Society as a man of 

 amiable, retiring character, but also as somewhat over-sensitive, 

 the latter attitude of his mind displaying itself elsewhere as well 

 as here. For instance, it appears that on one occasion he put up 

 under excellent auspices for the Fellowship of the Eoyal Society, 

 but not being at once elected he withdrew his name in a kind 

 of resentful modesty, which really had its root in a misappre- 

 hension. He failed to perceive that an unlimited number of 

 candidates for a limited number of vacancies cannot be sure of 

 election at the first time of asking, however worthy of it they all 

 may be. AVhatever his disappointments, howevei*, there is no 

 reason for thinking that his life on the whole was other than 

 a quietly happy one. His wife writes that he combined the 

 pleasure of travelling with his search for the materials of his 

 study. He went to the Nile for Cemtodus, to America for the 

 blind fish of the Caves of Kentucky, and visited Australia, Japan, 

 and various other places \\ith similar objects in view. 



[T. E. E. S.] 



