XVIII THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Professor Harold Wa^or, F. R.S., University of Leeds; and Professor 

 A. B. Macallum, F.R.S.. University of Toronto, and they were ac- 

 companied by Sir Mackenzie Bowell, Dr. Cr. C. Cossar and the mayor 

 of Nanaimo and others. 



The Dominion Government appointed him, ])y Order in Council, 

 a member of the British Cc^lumbia Fisheries' Commission, and in the 

 Commission's report, 1908, he gave a list of no less than thirty species 

 of edible Mollusca on our Pacific Coast, of which three species only are 

 used for food. While he thoroughly studied the shell-fish of British 

 Columbia, he also devoted much attention to the Pacific Crustacea, 

 and his "Preliminary List of twenty-nine species of British. Columbia 

 Decapod Crustaceans" has just been issued by the Dominion Govern- 

 ment (in vol. 3, Contributions to Canadian Biology). A list of small 

 shore-fishes, chiefly Cottoids, so abundant on the British Columbia coast, 

 was nearly completed before his last illness. The list includes many 

 new forms, of which one named Asemichthys Taylori, has been described 

 in a paper recently pul^lished by Professor C. H. Gilliert, Iceland-Stan- 

 ford University, who expressed the pleasure he had " in naming this 

 interesting specimen for its discoverer. Rev. Geo. W. Taylor, Nanaimo, 

 B.C." The number of species of fishes, molluscs, and insects, named 

 after him by various eminent authorities, sufficiently indicates the orig- 

 inality and zeal which characterized his work. The Mollusca, in 

 spite of his excellent work in Entomology and other fields, held a kind 

 of pre-eminence in his mind. His valuable list of Pacific Marine Mol- 

 lusca, covering eighty pages of this Society's Transactions (1895) is of 

 great and permanent value; but it is impossible, in this place, to make 

 even the most cursory reference to his fruitful labours in the field of 

 Conchology from the time of his early papers in the "Nautilus," until 

 his last yjaper in the "Contributions to Canadian Biology." 



As evidence of his assiduity, it may be pointed out that he reported 

 160 species of land and fresh water shells in Canada up to 1892, (includ- 

 ing a Vancouver Island list and an Ottawa Valley list) , but he had in- 

 creased the list to 244 species when he pubUshed his "Preliminary 

 Check- List" (June, 1892), which embraced 148 fresh-water shells and 

 96 land shells and he still further enlarged it to 250 species, in his re- 

 markably able i-eview, entitled "The Piesent Condition of Canadian 

 Conchology" {Ott. Nat. 1895). 



This able paper summarizes the work done in regard to the Marine 

 shell-fishes of the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, and of the land and fresh- 

 water shells of the interior of the Dominion, and includes a very im- 

 portant bibliography. The total number of species of Canadian Marine 

 Mollusca he gave as no less than 524, but as 32 species occur on both 

 coasts, the actual number recorded was 492. A few months later, in 



