1895- OBITUARY. 287 



membranous envelope of the larva. His last work, " Echino- 

 logica," published in July, 1892, was chiefly devoted to the teeth of 

 the sea-urchins and their accessory structures. In the posthumous 

 work of Angelin, the " Iconographia Crinoideorum," the Cystidea 

 were edited by Loven, but his great work on these obscure ancestors 

 of the echinoderms was never written. The beautiful plates are 

 prepared and lie in the Riksmusenm, but the brain that should 

 inform them with a connected meaning and elucidate them by the 

 garnered knowledge of eighty-six years has left the toil to other and 

 le-ser heads. 



The published works of Loven, and, indeed, the non-publication 

 of the others, all bear witness to his extreme caution. He worked 

 slowly and with the greatest care ; himself the most severe critic of 

 his own work, he left but little for others to criticise. It is partly this 

 caution, partly the extent of his knowledge, and partly, perhaps, some 

 prophetic imagination, that lend to many passages of his writings 

 their deep suggestiveness, unfathomable except by those that have 

 themselves long studied the questions with which he deals. 



The honours that came to Loven from learned bodies or from 

 Governments, and the societies — including agricultural, literary, and 

 musical — of which he was elected an ordinary or honorary member, 

 cannot here be recounted in full. So early as 1872 he was elected a 

 Corresponding Member of the French Institute in preference to no 

 less than Charles Darwin, while two years ago he received the 

 Prussian order, " pour la merite," this time in competition with 

 Huxley. " I have had remarkably bad luck," said he, " to be 

 preferred to the very two naturalists whom I myself rated most highly. 

 But it is not my fault." Loven was also a Foreign Member of the 

 Royal Society of London, and of the Academies of Science at Berlin 

 and Vienna. 



Portraits of Loven have been published. A bust and an oil 

 painting may be seen in the rooms of the Swedish Academy. But all 

 fail to do him justice. Of great stature and of noble feature, he 

 impressed one the rather with the sympathy of his manner and the 

 sweetness of his expresssion. These floating and indefinable shades 

 have been fixed by no artist, but will ever live in the hearts of those 

 that knew him. 



I cannot better finish this tribute to a great and a lovable 

 man than by quoting the words with which Professor Gustaf Retzius 

 ended his eloquent and feeling article in the Stockholm newspaper, 

 AftonUadet, on the day of Loven's death — words with which (may 

 I take it upon myself to say?) all English naturalists will deeply 

 sympathise : — 



" Sven Loven belonged to a family distinguished by personalities 

 prominent both in science and in affairs. Round his open grave, 

 which already holds two of his most beloved children — his daughter 

 Agnes and his son Sigurd, the eminent physician — this numerous family 



