VOL VI.] EDWARD WILSON. 291 



better than quote some notes he has been good enough 

 to furnish me with. 



" Edward A. Wilson," he says, " came up to Cam- 

 bridge in 1891, and rowed 'No. 3' in Gonville and 

 Caius College First Boat in 1894. He was placed in 

 the First Class in the Natural Science Tripos of the 

 same year and took his degree at once. He resided until 

 1895, in which year he went down to St. George's Hos- 

 pital. In 1898 he had threatenings of phthisis, and 

 spent some time abroad in a Sanatorium. He took his 

 M.B. in 1900. 



" The last four or five years that he spent in Britain 

 he devoted himself in a most indefatigable way to carryincr 

 out the work of the Departmental Committee of Enquiry 

 appointed by the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to 

 investigate the subject of Grouse Disease. It was 

 pioneer work, as httle was at that time known of either 

 the Grouse in health or the Grouse in disease, but Wilson's 

 medical knowledge, his marvellous Natural History 

 attainments, and his great skill as a draughtsman, were 

 invaluable to the research. He travelled extensively in 

 Scotland, getting in touch with practically all the moors. 

 He assisted in the experiments on the control material 

 at the Grouse Committee's experimental station at 

 Frimley, where Grouse were reared in captivity. He 

 dissected with his own hands nearly two thousand birds, 

 and minutely recorded their condition. With the help 

 of other members of the committee he gradually esta- 

 bhshed the fact that the bacillus to which Klein had 

 attributed the trouble was a post-mortem phenomenon, 

 and that the disease of the adult bird was caused, in the 

 main, by a round worm inhabiting the caeca. Later it 

 became apparent that the mortahty amongst the chicks 

 was largely due to Coccidium parasites, whose life-history 

 had been worked out by Dr. Fantham. 



"Wilson wrote quite one-third of the two quarto 

 volumes which deal with the ' Grouse in health and in 

 disease,' but he had to leave for the Antarctic Regions 



