CALIFORNIA AND OREGON. xi 



erysipelas, which eventually reached the brain, and killed him. 

 Although the disease was understood to be extremely con- 

 tagious, so much so that von Suhm was very carefully isolated 

 under a screen on the main deck, Moseley could not be pre- 

 vailed upon to keep away from his laboratory companion, whom 

 he tended and comforted to the last." 



On the " Challenger's " return to England Moseley was 

 promptly elected to a fellowship at his old College, Exeter. 

 Never, as Professor Ray Lankester has said, " was a College 

 Fellowship better bestowed — that was in the good old days 

 before Lord Selborne's Commission." He spent several years 

 at Oxford, working out the results of the expedition, publishing 

 during this time his highly important memoirs on the Mille- 

 porida, Stylasteridce and Helioporidce, as well as his report on the 

 true corals dredged during the expedition, the " Notes of a 

 Naturalist on Board the ' Challenger,' " and other papers. 



His memoir on Peripatiis capensis had been written during 

 the voyage, and had been published in the Philosophical Trans- 

 actions for 1874. To show the importance of these works, I 

 cannot do better than quote the words of the late Professor F. M. 

 Balfour : " By his discovery of a system of tracheal vessels in 

 Peripatus Mr. Moseley gave a new clue to the origin of 

 tracheae, and showed that the current views on this subject 

 were untenable. His memoir on Peripatus constituted, at the 

 same time, an important addition to our knowledge of the 

 phylogeny of Arthropods. By his investigations on living corals 

 he succeeded in assigning the true zoological position to a 

 special group of these forms, whose systematic position had 

 previously been extremely doubtful ; and he discovered a new 

 and hitherto unsuspected method of formation of the skeleton 

 of a large group of Hydrozoa." It was in recognition of these 

 solid contributions to zoological science that the Royal Society 

 in the early days of his illness in 1887 awarded him their 

 Royal Medal. 



In the summer of 1877 Moseley was commissioned by an 

 English company to report on certain lands in California and 

 Oregon, and took the opportunity of visiting Washington 

 Territory, Puget Sound, and Vancouver Island, and of studying 



