LIXNEA.X SOCIETY OF LONDON. 69 



subject in English, or perliaps in any language, and will long 

 remain a standard work." It is a remarkable monument to the 

 thoroughness of Minchin's work ; the Bibliographies to each 

 chapter which supplement the voluminous I'eferences in tlie foot- 

 notes, may be said to constitute a select Bibliography of the whole 

 subject, whilst the Index (of which he was always proud) made 

 the work practically encyclopcedic. Continually in correspondence 

 with protozoologists all over the world, he amassed a very remark- 

 able collection of books and papers upon the Protozoa, and we 

 are happy in being able to record that the Governing Body of the 

 Lister Institute pui'chased the entire collection after his death for 

 a sum generously calculated to prove of material advantage to his 

 widow. He was, it need hardly be said, an accomplished linguist, 

 and his tri-lingual speeches at Meetings of the British Association 

 may be described as linguistic feats. 



His papers on the structure, development, and classification of 

 the Calcareous Sponges were principally published between IS92 

 and 1898, though many later papers give the results of his further 

 observations. Th^se observations he made invariably upon the 

 living animal, a,nd he has often told the writer of his experiences 

 as a diver — in which art he was extraordinarily expert — collecting 

 }iis specimens himself, by hand, from the sea-bottom, and noting 

 their habits of growth and associations, clinging to a rock under 

 "water until compelled to return to the surface. " These studies 

 culminated in a masterly and beautifully illustrated memoir on 

 the development of the spicules of the Clathrinidae (Q. J. Micr. 

 Sci. vol. xl.), a triumph of technical skill over the difficulties 



encountered in dealing with minute histological details His 



mastery of technique was indeed remarkable, and great was bis 

 ingenuity in devising improvements in the instruments used and 

 routine followed in his investigations." The present writer 

 possesses what are probably the last highly technical preparations 

 made by Minchin — -a series of sections of a debatable organism 

 allied to the Foraminifera, in the determination of which Minchin 

 ■was still keenly interested during his last days at Selsey. These 

 preparations, though made in an interval of his last and fatal 

 illness, are no whit inferior to the sections that he made at the 

 time when his health was — for him — robust. 



In 1905 he was in Uganda working upon the Royal Society's 

 Sleeping Sickness Commission, and from that time until his death 

 he devoted all the time that could be spared from his professorial 

 duties to working at the life-histories of the Trypanosomes. 

 His last great -work was his Monograph, written in collaboration 

 with Mr. J. D. Thomson, on the Trypanosomes of the Bat-flea. 

 " Some idea of the magnitude of the work may be g-athered from 

 the fact that more than sixteen hundred fleas were examined and 

 dissected in the course of these researches." The results were 

 published in the Q. J. Micr. Sci. (vol. Ix.) only a few months 

 before his death. Of this work Sir E. Ray Laidiester in a letter 

 to the present writer says : — " It is one of the most thorough and 



