lo! 
Nachdruck verboten. 
Nekrolog. 
Professor WALTER FRANK RAPHAEL WELDON. 
No German zoologist will learn without regret of the sudden death 
on Good Friday last (13th of April) at the early age of forty-six of 
Professor WALTER Frank RAPHAEL Weipon, Linacre Professor of 
Comparative Anatomy in the University of Oxford; by those who have 
followed his work and appreciated his methods his premature decease 
will be deeply deplored. 
The son of a distinguished chemist WELDON was educated in 
London at King’s and University Colleges whence he passed, in 1878, 
to Cambridge, where he became the pupil of Francis MaıtLanp Bat- 
FOUR. In 1884 he was elected to a Fellowship at his College, 8. Jouns, 
and in the following year appointed University Lecturer on the Anatomy 
of the Invertebrates. 
Though educated in the school of pure morphology and phylogenetic 
speculation which had grown up in England under the influence of Lan- 
KESTER and BALFOUR, WELDON was one of the first, if not the first, of 
his countrymen to feel the total inadequacy of such speculations to 
supply a genuine theory, worthy to rank with the theories of chemists 
and physicists, of the evolution of organic form. He quickly realised 
that a fresh start must be made and data of an entirely different kind 
collected, of the kind indeed already indicated by Francis GALToN’s 
anthropometric researches. It thus became his ideal to give to biolo- 
gical observations, in particular to those relating to the phenomena of 
variation and heredity, an exact, quantitative expression, and in the sta- 
tistical method, later on elaborated by him in conjunction with Karn 
Pearson, he saw the instrument by which the end he sought could be 
achieved, the acquisition of a mass of data which should furnish the 
basis of a mathematical theory of evolution. 
The germ of this idea had already taken form in his mind before 
he became, in 1891, Professor of Zoology in University College, London; 
from that date onwards he devoted himself with unflagging ardour and 
unswearing determination to its practical working out. A long series 
of researches, extending over several years, enabled him to give a rigid 
demonstration of the existence amongst the crabs at Plymouth of natural 
selection consequent upon the altered physical conditions obtaining in 
the Sound; and work of a like nature — investigations into the in- 
heritance of seed-colour in peas, of coat-colour in mice and race-horses, 
of the form of the shell in Gasteropods -—— was continued after he had, 
in 1899, succeeded LanxestER in the Linacre Chair of Comparative 
Anatomy at Oxford; much of which remains, alas! unfinished. 
