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the excavations of Mr. Theodore M. Davies with some 
remarkable finds. No striking results were obtained 
until November 5 last, when Mr. Carter discovered the 
_ tomb of King Tutankhamen—a discovery unique in 
the annals of archeology. The interest of the objects 
taken from the tomb, remarkable both in their number 
and character, grew from day to day, and culminated 
on February 17, when the opening of the inner chamber 
revealed the shrines in which it is expected that the 
body of the king will be found. Work was then closed 
for the season. 
_ It adds a note of tragedy to Lord Carnarvon’s death 
that he will not be present when the opening of the 
‘innermost shrine crowns his labours, but his name will 
ways be honoured as one who added a vast store to 
knowledge of the civilisation of Ancient Egypt. 

Dr. C. I. Forsytu Major, F.R.S. 
Dr. CHARLES IMMANUEL ForsyTH Major, who died 
at Munich on March 25, aged seventy-nine, was born 
in Glasgow, of Scottish parents, but removed when an 
s) ofant to Constantinople, and lived for most of his life 
a He was educated in Switzerland, Germany, 
and aly. Graduated Doctor of Medicine in Basle in 
mammals. While occupied with his sb duties 
in Florence, he took every opportunity of collecting 
superficial deposits in the valley of the Arno, and from 
872 onwards he published in Italy a series of small 
papers on these remains, describing and discussing 
them in a more exhaustive manner than had previously 
been attempted. He summarised his results in the 
Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London 
in 1884, pointing out that the later. Pliocene mammals 
were all distinguishable from those of the early Pleisto- 
_cene when fossils were studied in detail. At the same 
time he published valuable memoirs on the dentition 
of rodents from the Bohnerz of Switzerland and South 
Germany (Palgontographica, xxii., 1873), and on the 
dentition of the early true horses (Abhandl. Schweiz. 
_ Paldont. Ges., 1877-80). 
About 1886 Dr. Major abandoned his medical 
practice, and began to devote himself entirely to scien- 
tific research. With the help and encouragement of 
his Swiss friend, M. W. Barbey, he made a thorough 
exploration of the Pliocene accumulation of mammalian 
_ bones in the island of Samos, and brought back a great 
collection, of which part was presented by M. Barbey 
to the Collége Gaillard at Lausanne, and the other part 
_ was purchased by the British Museum. In 1889 Dr. 
Major made another important collection of mammalian 
remains from a Pliocene torrent-deposit at Olivola in 
the Carrara mountains in Italy, and this was also 
purchased by the British Museum. Dr. Major followed 
his collections to the British Museum, and was tempor- 
arily employed there in cataloguing the fossil mammals 
until 1909. While thus occupied he published a 
valuable series of papers in London. He also arranged 
to prepare a Catalogue of Fossil Rodentia for the 
NO. 2789, VOL. I11] 
NATURE 
and examining the mammalian remains found in the | 
“March 12, at the age of fifty-three. 
595 
British Museum, and a large monograph of the Samos 
Mammalia, which unfortunately were never produced. 
In 1893 Dr. Major contributed his important memoir 
on the skull of a giant lemur, Megaladapis, from a 
cavern in Madagascar, to the Philosophical Transactions 
of the Royal Society, and the novelty of this discovery 
led him to plan an exploration of the caverns and 
marshes of Madagascar. With the aid of a government 
grant from the Royal Society, he visited Madagascar 
in 1894-95, and brought back an important collection 
of fossil mammals and birds, which is also now in the 
British Museum. On these fossils he wrote several 
descriptive papers. 
In his later years, however, Dr. Major found increas- 
ing difficulty and diffidence in preparing his results 
for publication, although his researches were pursued 
with accustomed diligence. Much of his valuable 
work on rodents and on the relationship between the 
fossil Samotherium, which he discovered in Samos, 
and the existing okapi of the Congo Forest, is thus 
unfortunately lost to science. Dr. Major was elected 
a fellow of the Royal Society in 1908, and about the 
same time was awarded a small Civil List pension. He 
then returned to the Mediterranean region which had 
interested him for so many years, and spent most of the 
remainder of his life in Corsica. He still continued to 
collect and study mammalian remains, chiefly from 
the caverns and rock-fissures of Corsica, but he now 
ceased to do more than make manuscript notes. 
A. S. W. 

Mr. E. W. VREDENBURG. 
GroLocy has lost a cultured worker by the death 
of Ernest Watson Vredenburg, who passed away on 
His death was 
probably hastened by the constant and now painfully 
verified foreboding that he might never be able to 
finish the great task which he had undertaken of 
revising the Tertiary paleontology of the Indian region. 
We have had occasion at times to notice some of the 
numerous instalments which he has published during 
the past few years in the Records of the Geological 
Survey of India; they and other papers now in the 
press were intended to prepare the way for a com- 
prehensive monograph which he hoped would justify 
his reason for differing from his colleagues on some 
questions of stratigraphical correlation; but the 
burden was too great for that hyper-sensitive, artistic, 
and retiring nature which tended to keep him apart 
from his colleagues, who nevertheless appreciated his 
deep learning, unrelenting industry, and tenacious 
adherence to independent views. 
Mr. Vredenburg, who was half French in race and 
wholly so in upbringing, graduated at Paris in Science 
and Letters before entering the Royal College of Science 
and School of Mines, where he took a double associate- 
ship, in geology and mining, before joining the Geo- 
logical Survey of India in 1895. He spent the first 
part of his official work on the relatively uninteresting 
unfossiliferous rocks of Central India, and did not 
get an opportunity of discovering his main bent till 
his transfer to Baluchistan, the geological features of 
which he revised and summarised in 1910. There 
and in the adjoining regions of Sind he became deeply 
interested in the stratigraphy and paleontology of the 
