I 



Atinual Report of the Council. xxix 



constitution of the chair, Haeckel was appointed to the zoological 

 professorship whilst Gegenbaur retained the teaching of anatomy, 

 which, however, in his hands, was always of a morphological and 

 never of a merely descriptive character. At Jena Gegenbaur 

 both as teacher and investigator shewed himself to be one of the 

 foremost German scientists, and to this period most of his 

 classical discoveries belong. 



IMany attempts were made on the part of other Universities 

 to attract Gegenbaur from his Thiiringian home, but not until he 

 had spent fourteen years at Jena did he elect to exchange his 

 position for one at Heidelberg, where he continued to the end 

 to be the foremost anatomist of his country, and one of the 

 sanest and shrewdest of its scientists. 



The Royal Society elected Gegenbaur a foreign member in 

 1884, and awarded him the Copley medal in 1896. In similar 

 ways every country that encourages scientific work has recognised 

 the influence and importance of Gegenbaur, and he reaped to 

 an unusual extent the honours that fall to men of the first rank. 



He was elected an Honorary Member of this Society on 

 April 26th, 1892. 



In person Gegenbaur was tall and robust, and of the dark 

 Bavarian type. His strongly developed personality stamped 

 itself on all he did or said. In affairs Gegenbaur was absolutely 

 straightforward, stern, terse, and on occasion choleric. From his 

 pupils he demanded a distressing exactitude, and his intuitive 

 power of reading character made the existence of many of his 

 research students a burden. 



Gegenbaur applied the comparative method to anatomy with 

 the keenest criticism of the weak points in phylogenetic specula- 

 tion. His leading principles were, that function makes and 

 modifies organisation, that such acquisitions are inherited, and 

 that no deduction or reconstruction of an ancestral stage can be 

 recognised unless each stands the test of physiological fitness. 



His writings are among the classics of anatomical literature. 

 His text-books on the anatomy of Vertebrates and of Man are 

 standard works. His memoirs and papers form the foundation 



