io4 



NATURE 



[Dec. 4, i! 



unwearied industry to the collection and comparison of 

 the Cephalopods of the Lias, and at length, after some 

 forty years of preparation, began his great monograph 

 on " The Lias Ammonites," a work of much research, 

 of which the concluding part is about to be issued, 

 and which forms an enduring landmark in the history 

 of English palaeontology. In the course of the inquiries 

 rendered requisite for this exhaustive treatise, he not 

 only made himself acquainted with the fossil localities 

 and public and private collections in this country, but paid 

 visits to many parts of the Continent to study the contents 

 of foreign museums and to confer with his fellow- 

 labourers in the same field scattered over France, 

 Switzerland, and Germany. He was engaged, at the 

 time of his death, upon a monograph of British Cretaceous 

 Starfishes, which he had nearly completed. 



The value of his scientific work has been fully recog- 

 nised by his contemporaries. He was early elected as a 

 Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Subsequently 

 he joined the Geological Society of London, and from 

 that body eventually received its highest honour — the 

 Wollaston Medal. In 1879 he was elected into the Royal 

 Society. He was President of the Geological Section' of 

 the British Association at the Bristol meeting in 1875. 

 His published papers and memoirs are numerous, but 

 the largest and most important are his monographs in 

 the publications of the Paheontographical Society. 



It was not alone by original research that Dr. Wright 

 strove to foster the progress of his favourite science. As 

 one of the fathers of the Cotteswold Field Club, as Presi- 

 dent of the Literary and Philosophical Association of 

 Cheltenham, as a frequent lecturer on scientific topics 

 not only in Cheltenham, but in Bristol, Bath, Worcester, 

 and other towns ; and generally by the enthusiasm with 

 which, amid all the obstacles of his busy professional 

 life, he contrived to find leisure for the cultivation of 

 science, he was unquestionably one of the living forces 

 that stimulated the growth of science all over the West 

 of England. His death is therefore a serious depriva- 

 tion, and will be mourned by all in that region to whom 

 scientific progress is dear. 



To a narrower but still a wide circle his removal from 

 among us is the loss of a leal-hearted friend. Those 

 who were thus privileged will cherish the memory of 

 that cheery face with the bright twinkle of eyes that 

 were as brimful at one time of merriment as, at another, 

 they were suffused with sympathy ; the joyous laughter 

 that rang out clear and strong from a heart in which there 

 was no guile ; the earnest brow and hand upturned 

 behind the ear as the talk went on over his favourite 

 pursuits ; the bursts of enthusiasm as some new fact or 

 novel deduction dawned on him, and the play of humour 

 that was ever ready to break out like a beam of sum- 

 mer sunshine. Dr. Wright made his final expedition in 

 August last year, when he joined the writer of these 

 lines in the Island of Arran. Already the symptoms of 

 his fatal malady had shown themselves, and he knew 

 what they foreboded. But he carried with him neverthe- 

 less his characteristic sunniness of nature. Seated on the 

 bare mountain-side with the purple heather and vellowed 

 bracken around him, the sea in front, and his own native 

 Renfrewshire hills in the blue distance, he became almost 

 a boy again as he told his reminiscences of old times and 

 watched the sports of children among the gray boulders. 

 Ripe in honours as in years, it seemed as if he had come 

 back to his early northern air to drink it once more, and 

 review his past before he should quit us for ever. He 

 would saunter for hours in the quiet glen, with no com- 

 panion but his own thoughts and the sights and sounds 

 of Nature, which were an ever-gushing fountain of 

 pleasure to him. Cherished is every memory of him, but 

 most of all those parting days spent with him at the foot 

 of the mountains and bv the shore of the restless sea. 



A. G. 



ROBERT A. C. GODWIN-AUSTEN, F.R.S. 

 T N many respects Mr. Godwin-Austen stood out apart 

 ■*• from his fellow-geologists in this country. He wrote 

 comparatively little, but what he did write was always 

 weighty and full of suggestiveness. Instead of loading 

 the literature of science with a pile of little papers, each 

 containing some trifling addition or supposed addition to 

 the sum of knowledge, or some criticism well- or ill- 

 founded of the work of others, he allowed his ideas to 

 mature, and published them from time to time in luminous 

 essays which many years afterwards may be read over 

 again with profit as well as pleasure. He began to write 

 about half a century ago, his earliest papers being devoted 

 to the geological features of Devonshire, of which, at that 

 time, very little was known. By degrees he extended the 

 area of his observations eastwards into the south-eastern 

 counties. His essays " On the Valley of the English 

 Channel" (1S50), and " On the Superficial Accumulations 

 of the Coasts of the English Channel, and the changes 

 which they indicate" (1851), were among the most 

 thoughtful contributions that had ever been made to the 

 elucidation of the existing outlines of sea and land. This 

 department of inquiry was one that peculiarly fascinated 

 him. Hence, when his friend Edward Forbes died and 

 left his " Natural History of the European Seas'' only 

 half completed, he himself chivalrously finished it, and 

 supplied some chapters which only an accomplished and 

 far-sighted geologist could have written. His various 

 papers on drift-gravels, on boulders in the Chalk, and 

 other superficial phenomena, are all marked by the same 

 grasp and breadth of treatment. 



But perhaps the paper which has chiefly contributed to 

 give Mr. Godwin-Austen his ascendency among English 

 geologists and to make his name known beyond geological 

 circles is his now well-known essay " On the Possible Ex- 

 tension of the Coal- Measures beneath the South-Eastern 

 Part of England " (1855). In this remarkable memoir he 

 brings to bear his detailed knowledge of the rocks of the 

 south-west of England, the north of France, and the adjoin- 

 ing tracts of Belgium. He marshals all his facts in such a 

 way as to enable us, as it were, to strip off the thick cover 

 of Mesozoic formations and trace the deep-seated con- 

 nection of the Palaeozoic area of Southern England and 

 the Continent. At the time when he wrote, nothing was 

 actually known of the subject, but he predicted that a 

 submerged Pakeozoic ridge would be found extending 

 from the south-west of England into France and Bel- 

 gium. The results of the deep borings of recent years 

 have fully verified this prediction. 



Mr. Godwin-Austen, in his prime, was a frequent 

 speaker at the meetings of the Geological Society, where 

 his keen penetrative criticism and caustic sarcasm formed 

 a prominent and valuable feature in the debates. Some 

 of his most suggestive and pregnant views of geological 

 questions were thrown off in the course of these debates, and 

 were never otherwise published by him. He never courted 

 publicity, but rather shrank from it as an incumbrance 

 under which he would not willingly be fettered. For 

 many years past he has lived as a retired country squire 

 at his beautiful residence near Guildford, taking full 

 interest in the progress of science, and glad to see his 

 fellow-workers in geology under his roof, but seldom 

 venturing into the turmoil of town and the disputatious 

 atmosphere of learned societies. It is some consolation 

 to geologists, who mourn the quenching of one of their 

 luminaries, that his place is taken by a son who, by scien- 

 tific labours in India and in this country, has proved 

 himself a worthy successor. 



CHARLES CLOUSTON 



'THE Rev. Chas. Clouston, LL.D., of Sandwick Manse, 



-*■ near Stromness, who died on the 10th ult. at the 



very advanced age of eighty-four years, was a man who 



