The Days of a Man 



Ci88i 



devoted themselves to fishes. Of these, four were 

 particularly helpful to me Albert Giinther, Leon 

 Vaillant, Christian F. Liitken, and Franz Hilgen- 

 dorf; later also, Franz Steindachner of Vienna, 

 though him I did not meet until 1910. 



Dr. Gunther, the best known of them all, was 

 born in Germany in 1830, and educated in Berlin, 

 Bonn, and Tubingen for the Lutheran ministry. 

 That career proving little to his taste, he then took 

 up the study of medicine, and found his way across 

 the Channel to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 

 London. But another and still deeper interest was 

 to dominate his life. From early boyhood he had 

 been fascinated by the problems of animal structure, 

 beginning his researches, as he once told me, with 

 the dissection of worms. Afterward at Tubingen, 

 where his room overlooked the river, he found great 

 enjoyment in the study of fishes caught from out 

 a window. So, finally abandoning medicine as pre- 

 viously he had theology, he became curator of 

 fishes in the British Museum, where the Keeper, 

 John Edward Gray, assigned to him the prepara- 

 tion of a descriptive catalogue of the ichthyological 

 collections. With the eight volumes of this great 

 work, the foundation of modern Ichthyology, he 

 occupied himself for the twelve years from 1859 

 to 1870, inclusive, putting in on the average four- 

 teen hours a day from pure love of the work. After- 

 ward, as Keeper himself, he remained in service until 

 the late '8o's, when the natural history collections 

 were removed from the old building on Great Rus- 

 sell Street to the new one on Cromwell Road in 

 South Kensington. He died in 1914, at the ripe 

 age of 84. 



C 270 3 



