96 Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



full conception of his famous " Type System, " which permeates all his 

 later educational books, and of which the germs are in reality to be 

 found in his ' Physiography,' originally delivered at a course of lec- 

 tures in 1869 and again in 1870, at some of which Mivart was present. 



Mivart will be best remembered in history as he who most stead- 

 fastly opposed the subsidiary doctrines of Darwinism, and the theory 

 of "Natural Selection" in particular. He tells us in his writings 

 how he at first embraced the latter, as formulated by Huxley ; but he 

 very soon forsook it and, remaining an Evolutionist, for the rest 

 of his life defended with reiterated emphasis the argument that 

 evolution proceeds from some internal force directed towards definite 

 ends, and that it is due to processes which are sudden and distinct, 

 and not to gradual changes. To him, the one central zoological fact 

 which clenched this argument was the vestigial state of the index 

 finger of the Potto, which, while later studying the Lemurs as a series, 

 he came to regard as the culminating phase of a modification common 

 to them all but one. He was never tired of reverting to this, both in 

 his later writing and in conversation. The Potto's manus figures on 

 the title-page of his ' Genesis of Species ' his first book, and he came 

 to the fuller study of the Lemurs through his first paper, wherefore the 

 main tenour of his life's work is seen to have been the direct out- 

 come of his earliest impressions. 



Much of his later work, both as a practical anatomist and a philo- 

 sopher, further reveals the impress of these ; for, while we find him in 

 later years returning to the study of the Lemurs, we note that he 

 extended his observations from their skeleton, to the brain, and, 

 less conspicuously, the muscles and viscera, of both them and the 

 higher Apes, in a series of memoirs which, as accurate records of 

 observed facts, will always remain valuable. And there is reason 

 to associate his work upon the brain, the surface anatomy of 

 which he carefully described in a large number of Mammals, with his 

 famous argument, that psychical operations fall under two classes 

 " sense perceptions" alone performed by the brutes, and "intel- 

 lectual perceptions" which, with them, being performed by man. 

 involve him in a dual psychical nature. Right well did he defend this, 

 more especialy in his ' Origin of Reason ' (1889), and his conviction, 

 based upon it, that a passage from the "mind" of the brute to the 

 conceptual mind of man is inconceivable. 



It is in connection with these beliefs that Mivart will best be 

 remembered as a philosophic writer; and, apart from those works 

 already alluded to as directly concerned with their elaboration and 

 support, he published others dealing with them and cognate subjects. 

 His ' Nature and Thought an Introduction to Natural Philosophy ' 

 {1882), and his latest philosophic work ' The Groundwork of Science ' 

 (1894), may be here named the latter a most elaborate study of 



