2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 82 



when his teaching in the Zoological Schools of Cambridge have be- 

 come a mere tradition; when his patient, laborious work upon the 

 geology, ethnology, and ornithology of the South Seas has become 

 but a brick in the vast edifice of human knowledge; indeed so long 

 as men shall devote labor and research to the science of protozoology, 

 the name of Joseph Jackson Lister, like that of his illustrious uncle, 

 Lord Lister, and of Harvey, Jenner, Leeuwenhoek, Redi, and 

 Schwann, will live in the hearts and on the lips of men, and the dis- 

 covery which will spring to the mind when his name is mentioned 

 will be that of the reproductive processes of the reticularian Rhizopods, 

 especially those of PoIystomcUa, and the meaning and significance of 

 dimorphism. 



Those of us who were privileged to know him, and especially 

 those of us who in our researches have followed in his footsteps, 

 know how delicate and polite was his use of the results of his 

 amazing industry, patience, and almost universal interests — industry 

 and interests pursued and recorded indefatigably in the face of physi- 

 cal difficulties beneath which a lesser man would have early succumbed. 

 How much more profound must be the appreciation of one who, 

 like myself, has been privileged to examine his laboratory note-books 

 and the mass of valuable papers that he left behind him at his early 

 death — left in a condition of such exquisite perfection that the ex- 

 aminer is never once checked by the reflection : " If only he were here 

 to explain exactly what he meant by that." 



I should hesitate, for fear of being accused of extravagance of 

 speech, to describe the note-books of Lister, were it not that they 

 lie before me as I write and that Mrs. Lister has presented them to 

 form part of the Heron-Allen and Earland library and collections 

 at the Natural History Museum (London), where they will be always 

 available, for the instruction and emulation of future generations of 

 protozoologists. He made notes, not merely for his own use in the 

 kind of personal cryptogram which we are all apt to adopt in recording 

 our own observations, but for the guidance of any research-workers 

 that should come after him. Every sketch or drawing that he made 

 was as highly finished as though it had been prepared for publication, 

 and the systematic dating of his notes enables us to follow his work 

 step by step, and, for practically the whole of his working life, day by 

 day. 



It was in the course of the examination that I have been privi- 

 leged to make, that I came across his own manuscript record of his 

 work at Plymouth, extending from June i to August 9, 1894, a 



