WILLIAM EVANS, F.R.S.E., ETC. 171 



These seem to be the influences that set the main drift 

 of his life ; the remainder of his experiences need only 

 be briefly referred to. He was schooled at the Free Kirk 

 School of East Linton, and at Edinburgh Institution after 

 his father left Tynefield, about 1864, to become estate 

 agent to Sir G. Clark of Penicuik. He left school at the 

 age of 16 or 17, and as a junior joined the Scottish Widows' 

 Fund, from which, after he had attained the post of 

 assistant actuary, ill-health compelled him to retire in 1892. 

 The quarter of a century spent in this work must be 

 regarded as a great break in the main course of Mr Evans' 

 life, and it is probably to be accounted for, apart from 

 the immediate influences of the friends of his youth, by 

 the fact that the late sixties of last century offered no 

 inducements nor even opportunities for the adoption of a 

 scientific career. 



Although Evans threw himself whole-heartedly into the 

 work of his profession, becoming a Fellow of the Faculty 

 of Actuaries, and publishing several actuarial papers of 

 importance, the naturalist slumbered only skin-deep. His 

 election to the Fellowship of the Royal Physical Society in 

 1880 was the scratch that revealed the true man, and from 

 the date of his first paper, in the Proceedings of the year 

 following, a steady stream of records and painstaking 

 observations flowed from his pen. The nervous illness 

 which hampered his work and compelled him eventually to 

 resign from his profession was a blessing in disguise, for 

 under a careful regime and open-air existence he became 

 sufficiently restored in health to be able to prosecute the 

 field studies which lay to his heart, to the everlasting benefit 

 of the natural history of Scotland. 



During these latter years his friends noted with dismay 

 the frequency with which ill-health again came upon him, 

 and after a short illness, during which his interest in 

 natural history continued unabated, he died peacefully on 

 Monday, 23rd October 1922. 



William Evans was pre-eminently a field naturalist, 

 of that school of wide sympathies of which, alas ! few 

 representatives now remain. Even had his own bent not 



