LIXXEAX SOCIETY OP LONDOX. Ill 



dreary and desolate places. In tliis ]inpi)v view of his life's work 

 he was doubtless assisted by an uncoininon power of working 

 hard without any feeling of laborious effort. A friend of his has 

 remarked that lie had, like his father, a great facility for extracting 

 the kernel of a, memoir or book witliout wading through a very 

 large proportion of the words. He instinctively fastened upon 

 A\hat was essential, and made it his own, and would read through 

 a surprising amount of difficult and often dry literature without 

 any apparent effort. Moreover, he was an excellent linguist and 

 could not only read but speak several languages with ease and 

 fluency. The same faculties that made Weldon a brilliant 

 conversationist made him a lecturer oi" exceptional merit. He 

 had a strong dramatic instinct, and utilized it to the full in the 

 lecture-theatre and class-room. Aided by a natural aptitude for 

 drawing, lie would develop a subject both by speech and by finished 

 drawings on the black-board, till it seemed to "row under his 

 hand?, and the driest subjects of anatomy took life and became 

 replete with interest. His lectui'es at University College attracted 

 not only a hirge class of students but also many of his colleagues, 

 and his public courses of lectures at Oxford were no less suc- 

 cessful. 



Weldon's zoological work falls naturally into two periods. 

 Trained at Cambridge under Prof, i'rancis Balfour, he naturally 

 came under the influence of the embryological and morphological 

 school of thought then dominant not only in England but on the 

 Continent. His earliest papers of importance were published in 

 IS8.3. One, on the early development of Lacerta rnuralis, is a 

 careful piece of embryological work, such as was produced in con- 

 siderable quantity at Cambridge at that period. The other, on 

 some points in the anatomy of Phcenicopterus and its allies, was 

 the outcome of Mork carried on in the Zoological Society's 

 Gardens. 



Tor some years after taking bis degree Weldon followed the 

 prevailing trend of zoological thought, and hoped, as the best 

 zoologists then hoped, that the chief problems of animal evolution 

 would be on a fair way to solution as embryological evidence 

 accumulated. "With this object in view, he made frequent journeys 

 abroad to collect embryological material or to study the develop- 

 ment of some marine organism on the spot. His expedition to 

 the Bahamas was made with the pui-pose of studying the develop- 

 ment of the Tornaria larva of Balanoglossus. Between 18S3 and 

 1S89 he published several memoirs, all distinguished for careful 

 and methodical observation and considerable originality in mor- 

 phological speculation, but their contents need no special mention 

 in this place. AVhen he went to Plymouth in 1888 his purpose 

 was to study the development of the Crustacea, and for more tlian 

 a year he applied himself diligently to this work, though his 

 memoirs on the renal organs of the i)ecaiioda and the development 

 of the Common Shrimp did not appear till 1891 and 18112. But 



