LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. xliii 



writing without having completely mastered everything that 

 had been previously written upon the subject, and his memoirs 

 bristle with quotations from, and references to, authors of all 

 ages and all nations. The abundance with which these were 

 supplied by his wonderful memory, and the readiness with 

 which, both in speaking and writing, his thoughts clothed them- 

 selves with appropriate words, sometimes made it difficult for 

 ordinary minds to follow the train of his argument through long 

 and voluminous sentences, often made up of parenthesis within 

 parenthesis. The work which was most especially the outcome 

 of his professorial duties is the "Forms of Animal Life," pub- 

 lished at the Clarendon Press in 1870. Though written chiefly 

 with a view to the needs of the University students, it is capable 

 of application to more general purposes, and is one of the 

 earliest and most complete examples of instruction by the study 

 of a series of types, now becoming so general. As he says in 

 the preface, " The distinctive character of the book consists in its 

 attempting so to combine the concrete facts of zootomy with the 

 outlines of systematic classification, as to enable the student to 

 put them for himself into their natural relations of foundation 

 and superstructure. The foundation may be wider, and the 

 superstructure may have its outlines not only filled up, but 

 even considerably altered by subsequent and more extensive 

 labours ; but the mutual relations of the one as foundation and 

 the other as superstructure which this book particularly aims at 

 illustrating, must always remain the same." ' Rolleston's desire 

 that his professorship should be divided into more manageable 

 departments was not fulfilled in his lifetime, but the 

 University has since partly carried out his recommendations, 

 his field of work being now occupied by the Linacre Professor of 

 Human and Comparative Anatomy (Professor Moseley), the 

 Waynflete Professor of Physiology (Professor Burdon-Sanderson), 

 and the Reader in Anthropology (Dr. E. B. Tylor). One of the 

 latest tasks which Rolleston took up, the pressure of which 

 indeed shortened his life, was to embody the new and ever- 

 growing results of comparative anatomy in a fresh edition of his 



