420 



NATURE 



[August 31, 1893 



I 



the section is one by Mr. Romilly Allen on the "Origin 

 and Development of Early Christian Art in Great Britain 

 and Ireland." This paper is to be well illustrated. 

 Indeed, this is the case with most of the archaeological 

 papers. Dr. Hildebrand is arranging illustrations of the 

 Swedish antiquities he wishes to compare with our 

 Anglo-Saxon ones, in groups, which are to be printed on 

 sheets and distributed among the audience when he 

 reads his communication. 



The information contained in the above paragraphs 

 has been furnished by request by presidents and recorders 

 of sections ; possibly further details may be forwarded 

 in time for publication before the meeting. 



The promises of exhibits of scientific apparatus, models, 

 diagrams, and photographs in the laboratories of the 

 University College, Nottingham, are now coming in. 

 Scientific novelties are promised for the conversazione at 

 the Castle. 



Visitors can obtain on application the usual lists of 

 hotels and lodgings. Frank Clowes. 



GEORGE BROOK. 



GEORGE BROOK, whose untimely decease on 

 August 12 we have already chronicled, was born 

 on March 17, 1857. He died, therefore, in his thirty-sixth 

 year, apparently from the effects of heat- apoplexy, while 

 on a visit to his wife's family near Newcastle-on-Tyne. 

 On the fatal day he joined a shooting party on the 

 adjacent moor ; after a successful expedition and a re- 

 past in the shooting-box, he was complaining laughingly 

 of the necessity for early rising on such occasions, when 

 his head fell back and he expired without uttering a 

 sound. He was buried at Benwell Church, Newcastle, 

 where, six years previously, he was married to Fanny, 

 second daughter of Mr. Walter Scott, of Riding Mill. 

 He was educated at the Friends' School, Alderley Edge, 

 and, although he afterwards studied for a couple of 

 years under Prof. Williamson and others at the Owens 

 College, Manchester, he may be said to have been, as a 

 naturalist, mostly self-taught. His earlier years of active 

 life were spent in his father's business at Huddersfield, 

 and he turned the experience thus gained to good 

 account in his after career. His first definite associ- 

 ation with scientific work dates from his connection 

 with the recently deceased Mr. J. W. Davis, of Halifax, 

 and others, in the prosecution of biological investigation 

 in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was in 1884 ap- 

 pointed scientific assistant to the Scottish Fishery Board 

 and lecturer on comparative embryology to the University 

 of Edinburgh. He retired from the first-named office 

 in 1887, leaving as a legacy a series of valuable notes 

 and reports upon the food fishes, but the last-named 

 one he held till death. As an embryologist, he is 

 himself best known for his work upon the origin of the 

 endoderm from the periblast in teleostean fishes, and 

 although not the first to have suggested this, it must be 

 said, in justice to his memory, that certain recent investi- 

 gators have reverted to his views without according him 

 befitting recognition. His love of experimental marine 

 zoology, and his personal munifi:ence in the interests of 

 pure science, reasserted themselves in 1 889, in his attempt 

 to found a lobster hatchery and marine observatory at 

 Loch Buie,Isle of Mull, duly noted in our pages (Nature, 

 vol. xlii. p. 399), and which we know to have involved him 

 in a not inconsiderable loss. He was secretary to the 

 Huddersfield Naturalists' Society, and to the Scottish 

 Microscopical Society, of which he was a founder; he 

 was for three years a vice-president of the Royal Physical 

 Society of Edinburgh, and a member of council of the 

 same, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal 

 Society of Edinburgh. He had recently joined the Zoo- 

 logical Society, and was but a few months ago appointed 



NO. 1244, VOL. 48] 



an examiner in Biology to the Royal College of Physicians, 

 Edinburgh. In the year 1889 he rose suddenly into fame 

 as the author of the Challenger Report on the Anti- 

 patharia. His preliminary paper, dealing (Proc. R. Soc. 

 Edi7t., vol. xvi. p. 35) with the homologies of the mesen- 

 teries in the Antipatharia and the Anthozoa, had apprised 

 the world of the breadth of his incpiiry into, and the ex- 

 tent of his knowledge of, this difficult and little under- 

 stood group ; but the preparation, within approximately 

 a year, of that which came to be termed " one of the most 

 praiseworthy " of all the Challenger reports, set a seal to 

 his reputation, and exalted him to a foremost position 

 among living Actinologists. In this work he elaborated 

 his important discovery of dimorphism (in Schizopathi- 

 na:) by division of a single primitive zooid into three, 

 instead of by specialisation of individual polypes ; and at 

 the time of his death he had well-nigh completed an import- 

 ant paper dealing with this and kindred subjects, for which 

 his talented assistant, Mr. Binnie, had prepared a large 

 series of beautiful sections and some elaborate drawings. 

 The thorough and conscientious manner in which 

 he had worked out the Antipatharians of the Challenger 

 collection led, in 1S90, to his engagement by the Trustees 

 of the British Museum for the arrangement and cata- 

 loguing of their very large collection of stony co: als ; 

 and the present month marks the publication of that 

 which will perhaps rank as his magnum opus, viz., the 

 " Catalogue of the Genus Madrepora," a quarto volume of 

 212 pages, with 35 beautiful plates, mostly from photo- 

 graphs taken by himself. This welcome treatise, which 

 was the first of a projected series dealing with the stony 

 corals, like most of the set to which it belongs that have 

 appeared under Dr. Giinther's direction, is, in reality, no 

 catalogue at all, but rather a revisionary monograph, 

 founded upon the study of rich material from world-wide 

 localities, which must furnish a basis for succeeding 

 inquiry into the group with which it deals. None but 

 those who enjoyed the deceased author's personal friend- 

 ship can form an adequate idea of the labour and expen- 

 diture, both of time and capital, which he bestowed upon 

 this volume. It is the practical outcome of the last 

 three years of his life's work. The success with which he 

 dealt with the bewildering difficulties before him may be 

 perhaps sufficiently gauged frorn its " Introduction," and 

 to what important lines of structural investigation and 

 conclusions the task was leading him, it is obvious 

 from this and his last published paper " On the Affinities 

 of the Genus Madrepora" {Jour. Linn. Soc. Zool. xxiv. 



P- 353)- 



The most striking features in George Brook's per- 

 sonality were his right living and his manly independence, 

 his moral attributes being in every way worthy his 

 mental ones. There can be no question that his 

 capacity to form an independent judgment, and his 

 great powers of organisation, under the influence of his 

 indomitable will, formed the keystone of his successes, 

 and placed him in a position to rise supreme above petty 

 jealousy and the evils begotten of narrow cliquism and 

 over-ambition. His natural inclinations were towards solid 

 work, as will be obvious from his having originally 

 settled down to the study of the Crustacea, but to re- 

 linquish it for that of the Corals — a choice which makes 

 his loss a well-nigh irreparable one to British zoologists of 

 the present generation. In addition to the many unfinished 

 works to which we have alluded, he has left behind him 

 at least the material for a reconsideration of the morph- 

 ology of certain great veins in the Amniota, and for a 

 detailed report upon some of the corals collected by Prof. 

 Haddon in the Torres Strait, which had been placed in 

 his hands. Indeed, almost his last words to the writer 

 of this notice were expressive of a desire to "get on? 

 with the latter. His final act, as a zoologist, was tl^ 

 determination of a Collemboloid (upon which grouptie 

 was an authority) for his friend Prof. W. A. Herdria"' 



