March 30, 1899] 



NA TURE 



5'3 



He also rendered most important services to sub- 

 marine telegraphy, acting as chairman of a Committee 

 appointed by the Government to investigate the reasons 

 for the failure of the Atlantic cable of 1858, and the Red 

 Sea and Indian cable ; the report of this Committee, 

 issued in 1861, is recognised as the "most valuable col- 

 lection of facts, warnings and evidence ever compiled 

 concerning submarine cables." 



In i860 he was appointed Assistant- Inspector-General 

 of Fortifications, and two years later he became Assistant- 

 Under-Secretary of State for War. After his retirement 

 from this post he became Director of Works and Public 

 Buildings in Her Majesty's Office of Works, an appoint- 

 ment which he held until 1875. 



He was for twenty-five years General Secretary of 

 the British Association, and this fact alone should win 

 for him the gratitude of scientific men ; and he only 

 resigned that post to be appointed President in 1S95. 

 But sanitary matters especially attracted his attention. 

 As Captain Galton he invented the grate which still 

 goes by his name, and which introduced a new idea. He 

 never patented this invention, so it was to no one's interest 

 to push it ; had it not been for this state of things, there 

 is no doubt that it would long ago have come into general 

 use, and would probably have brought a large fortune to 

 its inventor. 



He was connected with all the great sanitary under- 

 takings of the last forty years or more. Whether it 

 was the main drainage of the metropolis, or the im- 

 provement of the health of the army, or the training of 

 sanitary inspectors. Sir Douglas Galton was always to 

 the fore ; in fact, no scheme connected with sanitary 

 improvement has for many years past been considered 

 complete without his co-operation. He strongly opposed 

 the scheme of the Metropolitan Board of Works by 

 which the sewage of London was discharged into the 

 river at Barking and Crossness, urging that a nuisance 

 would be created by it, and that it should be taken down 

 as far as Sea Reach in order'to be diluted with a much 

 larger volume of water. The result amply justified his 

 anticipations, and showed the correctness of his judgment. 



He was one of the early supporters of the Parkes 

 Museum, and also the leading spirit of the Sanitary 

 Institute, of the Council of which he was chairman for 

 the second time at his death ; but to enumerate the 

 positions he filled, and filled with distinction, would take 

 up too much space. 



He was elected an Honorary Member of the Institution 

 of Civil Engineers in 1850, and a Fellow of the Royal 

 Society in 1859, and received the honorary degrees of 

 D.C.L. from the University of Oxford, and LL.D. from 

 Durham and from Montreal. He was made a C.B. in 

 1S65, and a K.C.B. in 1887. 



Personally he was a kindly and genial man who made 

 many friends, and few, if any, enemies, and his " amiable 

 personality," a phrase happily applied to him by one of 

 the foreign delegates of the International Congress of 

 Hygiene and Demography in 1891, of the executive 

 committee of which he was chairman, will be much 

 missed. W. H. C. 



PROFESSOR OTHNIEL CHARLES MARSH. 



JUST within a period of two years the United States 

 has lost two of its most distinguished palreontologists, 

 Cope having passed away on April 12, 1897, while the 

 death of Marsh is announced to have taken place on the 

 1 8th of March of the present year. The two names have 

 been associated (not always, unfortunately, in the most 

 amicable manner) in connection with the marvellous dis- 

 coveries of strange and gigantic creatures which have 

 rendered the last five-and-tvventy years unique in the 

 history of pala!ontology ; and it may be regarded as 



NO. 1535. VOL. 59] 



certain that none of their successors, however able they 

 may be, will ever attain the world-wide celebrity accorded 

 to these distinguished workers. For as Owen and Huxley 

 are the two English biologists whose names have become 

 household words, so Marsh and Cope are the popular 

 representatives of Trans-.Atlantic pateontological investi- 

 gation. 



Marsh, who was considerably the elder of the two, was 

 the more familiarly known in England, from his custom 

 of making periodical visits to Europe at comparatively 

 short intervals. His last visit was to the Zoological 

 Congress held at Cambridge during the past summer ; 

 and all those who then saw him could scarcely fail to notice 

 that the hand of death had already made its grip on the 

 once stalwart frame. 



According to the information at present available to 

 us, it appears that Marsh was sixty-eight years of age at 

 the time of his decease. Born in the States, he received 

 a large portion of his education at Yale ; but he also- 

 studied geology and pahfontology at various continental 

 seats of learning, such as Berlin, Breslau, and Heidel- 

 berg, thus acquiring a wide basis of knowledge which 

 stood him in good stead in after years. He was appointed 

 to the chair of Palaeontology in the University of Vale in 

 the year 1866 ; and this important post he held till his 

 death. For many years he was also pal.eontologist in 

 charge to the U.S. Geological Survey, at first under 

 Clarence King and then J. W. Powell ; but of his subse- 

 quent relations to that department we are not fully aware. 

 Marsh possessed the University degrees of Ph.D., LL.D., 

 and M.A.; and his great attainments were recognised 

 by his affiliation to many European scientific bodies. In 

 this country, he was a Fellow of the Geological Society, 

 having been elected as far back as 1863, and in 1877 

 having received the first award of the then newly-founded 

 Bigsby Medal. In 1881 he was elected a Corresponding 

 Member of the Zoological Society of London ; and he 

 was likewise on the roll of the British Association, whose 

 meetings he on several occasions attended. A nephew, 

 we believe, of the late George Peabody, Marsh was a 

 man of considerable, if not large fortune ; and to this 

 circumstance is partly owing the vast extent of the collec- 

 tions he succeeded in accumulating. 



Prout's discovery in 1846 in the Miocene strata of 

 Western America of remains belonging to the animals now 

 known as Titatiotheriuin was the commencement of the 

 investigations which made celebrated the names of Leidy, 

 Cope, and Marsh. But it was not till 1869 that the older 

 beds on the western flanks of the Rocky Mountains were 

 explored, and the Eocene mammals of America thus 

 brought to light. It was in this year that the explorations 

 in the neighbourhood of Fort Bridger at the base of the 

 Uinta Mountains were commenced ; and it was from this 

 district that the Uinta, Bridger, Wasatch, and Wind River 

 beds received their names. The first worker in this field 

 of research was Leidy, whose labours were mainly con- 

 fined to the fauna of the higher Tertiary beds of the 

 " Mauvaises Terres " to the east of the Rocky Mountains. 

 By 1862, in which year appeared his paper on Eosai/rus 

 from the Carboniferous of Nova Scotia, Marsh was, 

 however, well to the fore as a working palreontologist, 

 and shortly after the opening-up of the Fort Bridger dis- 

 trict as a fossiliferous locality he was almost at the zenith 

 of his fame ; the year 1872 being notable as the one \n 

 which the now well-known names Ichtliyoniis and Hcs- 

 pcrornis were applied to the toothed birds of the Kansas 

 Cretaceous. Some idea of the rapidity with which speci- 

 mens were collected and described may be gathered 

 from the fact that between the years 1862 and 1879 

 Marsh proposed no less than 134 new generic terms for 

 the fossils he accumulated and described. That many of 

 these names subsequently turned out to be synonyms, 

 in no way detracts from the energetic character of his 

 labours. For it must be remembered that between 1869 



