266 



NATURE 



[November 4, 1915 



and ultimately, when the cordite explosives were 

 under consideration, a new set of experiments 

 pointed out the modifications in g-un construction 

 that were necessary. It may safely be said that 

 Noble threw light upon every question of internal 

 ballistics. No doubt at Elswick he had very great 

 facilities^ but these would have been of no avail 

 if he had not supplied practical knowledge and 

 scientific insight, and supported these by his 

 vigorous mind and untiring energy. It has been 

 said that when a problem has been correctly 

 stated, much has been already done towards its 

 solution. When internal ballistics was in a state 

 of chaos, Noble was able to extract the real ques- 

 tions from much that was irrelevant, and to give 

 them a scientific statement. The result of his 

 work has been that the splendid guns which we 

 possess in the Navy and Army are at least as 

 good as any in the world. It is certain that no 

 history of gunnery will be complete which does 

 not devote much space to a description of his 

 pioneer work. That work was recog-nised on two 

 occasions by the Royal Society : in 1870, when 

 he was elected to the Fellowship, and in 1880, 

 when he was awarded a Royal Medals 



P. A. M. 



DR. R. ASSHETON, F.R.S. 



BRITISH zoology, which recently sustained a 

 severe loss by the death of Prof. Minchin, 

 has received a second blow by the unexpected 

 death of Dr. R. Assheton, which occurred at his 

 residence. Riverside, Grantchester, near Cam- 

 bridge, oh October 24. 



Dr. Assheton was born at Downham Hall in 

 Lancashire in 1863, and belonged to an old Lan- 

 cashire family. He was educated at Eton and 

 afterwards entered Trinity College, Cambridge, 

 where he came under the influence of the new 

 school of embryology founded by Foster and 

 Balfour and ably carried on by Sedgwick. He 

 read for the Natural Sciences Tripos, in which he 

 took first-class honours when he graduated in 

 1886. Thereafter he devoted himself to research 

 in embryology, and was not long in making a 

 name for himself. In 1889 he was appointed 

 lecturer in zoology under Prof. Milnes Marshall 

 in Victoria University, Manchester, and he held 

 this post until Prof. Marshall's death in 1893. 

 In 1901 he was appointed lecturer in biology to 

 the medical school in Guy's Hospital, and took 

 up his residence in Grantchester; he resigned 

 this office in 1914 in order to give his whole 

 time to teaching and research in Cambridge, where 

 he was appointed lecturer in animal embryology. 

 In the same year he received the well-merited 

 honour of election into the Royal Society. 



Assheton 's earlier work was concerned with the 

 difficult subject of mammalian embryology, and 

 especially with the earlier stages of development 

 and the beginnings of the placenta. He under- 

 took a costly series of investigations into the 

 early development of the sheep, and arrived at a 



NO. 2401, VOL. 96] 



novel view of the origin of the wall of the blasto- 

 derm vesicle from which the fcetal part of the 

 placenta is principally derived. This he considered 

 to be endodermic, not, as had always previously 

 been believed, ectodermic. We think that this 

 view is not adequately supported by the evidence 

 which he adduced, and that it will scarcely sur- 

 vive. But Assheton did not by any means confine 

 himself to mammalian embryology.' The earlv 

 stages of development of the frog, and the 

 development of the curious Egyptian fish, Gym- 

 narchus niloticus, also became the subjects of his 

 researches. 



From the very beginning of his work there 

 was one feature by which Assheton was dis- 

 tinguished from most of his contemporaries. He 

 was not content either with the simple description 

 of developmental processes or with the search 

 for their phylogenetic significance. In every 

 case he endeavoured to analyse these processes 

 into the differential rates of growth which under- 

 lay them, and then to find reasons for the differ- 

 ential rates of growth in differences of nutrition. 

 He was, in a word, the first experimental embry- 

 ologist in England. He succeeded in opening 

 the hen's egg and keeping it still alive and de- 

 veloping for some days, and in this way he was 

 able to watch the development of one and the 

 same embryo, and by suitable tests to measure 

 its growth. At a time when many embryologists 

 were inclined to accept the view of His, that the 

 nervous and skeletal axes of vertebrates were 

 built up by the gradual concrescence of two lips 

 bordering an elongated slit, Assheton was able 

 to show that this view was an entire misinter- 

 pretation of the events, and to propound a solu- 

 tion which substituted for the alleged concres- 

 cence a growth in length of the embryo which 

 he called deuterogenesis. All subsequent careful 

 work has supported Assheton 's view. Finally, 

 in a paper entitled "The Geometrical Relation of 

 the Nuclei in an Invaginating Gastrula (Amphi- 

 oxus), considered in connection with cell-rhythm 

 and Driesch's conception of entelechy," he 

 measured swords with the "entelechy " of Driesch, 

 and in substituting for that mystical factor a 

 simple force which may well be of chemical or 

 physical nature. At the time of his death Dr. 

 Assheton was engaged in the preparation of a 

 text-book of the embryology of mammalia. If 

 this work was at all near completion it is to be 

 hoped that it may be published, as otherwise a 

 most valuable compilation of facts and a store- 

 house of illuminating ideas would be lost to 

 science. 



Dr. Assheton married a daughter of Sir Thomas 

 Bazley, Bart., and is survived by his widow, one 

 son, and two daughters. His son is serving as 

 an officer in the ist Cambridgeshire Regiment. He 

 had a most charming personality which attracted 

 all who knew him, and his loss will be deeply 

 regretted by a wide circle of colleagues and 

 friends. 



E. W. M. 



