LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. 67 



Upon the war breaking out, Dr. Lock was requested to 

 organize experiments on the drying of fruit and vegetables, so as 

 to increase the national supply of perishable foodstuffs. He 

 threw himself with characteristic energy into his work, and 

 noth withstanding medical orders to the contrary, continued to 

 push the work of his Committee during two severe attacks of 

 influenza in l^'ebruary and March, 1915. Even after this he 

 refused to take a holiday, and his premature death must be 

 ascribed to the injury thus caused to his nervous system. At the 

 time of his death he was nominated the British Representative 

 at Eome on the Council of the International Agricultural 

 Institute. 



Thus passed away at the early age of 36, a life which promised 

 great results. Dr. Lock was elected a Fellow of the Linnean 

 JSociety, 2nd May, 1912. [B. D. J.] 



Edward Alfred Minchin, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S. — " It is sad to 



know that such a lovable man, representing the highest type of 

 scientific worker, remains with us now only as a memory. It is 

 rarely that a scientific man is held by every one of his colleagues 

 and contemporaries in such esteem as Minchin has been." These 

 words in a letter of Prof. R. A. Gregory to the present writer, after 

 the passing of Prof. Edward A. Minchin, represent and reflect 

 the rarely felt grief with which the scientific world learned of 

 his death, which took place at Selsey Bill, in Sussex, on the 

 30tli September, 1915. 



Born in 1S66, the son of Charles N. Minchin by Mary J. 

 Lugard his wife, Minchin may be said to have been prematurely 

 cut down in the full meridian of his life's work. That his end 

 was hastened by a constitutional weakness which had afflicted 

 him from his birth there can be no doubt ; indeed, it was a marvel 

 to his family that he ever reached adolescence, but to the last day 

 of his life, as the writer, who was with him to the end, can testify, 

 his brain never showed the faintest sign of weariness, and his 

 clear critical faculty and cultured turn of phrase and epigram 

 never weakened. Two days before his death, in reply to a 

 quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Life, as we call it, 

 is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where 

 it comes on soundings," he said, in one of those quiet flashes 

 which made him such a delightful companion, " And Death, as 

 we call it, is nothing but the unfathomed deep of the ocean of 

 existence where we lose the sounding apparatus — bottles, thermo- 

 meters and all ! " 



We take the historical stages of his career from the adniirable 

 and sympathetic obituary notice contributed by Mr. E. S. 

 Goodrich to 'JNature' (7th October, 1915). He was educated 

 at first privately, on account of his extreme delicacy, and was for 

 a short time at the United Service College at AVestward Ho ! 

 Having joined his parents, who were then resident in India, at the 

 age of fourteen he was at the Bishop Cotton School in Bangalore, 



