Obituary — Melchior Neumayr. 239 



he issued his first paper in conjunction with Dr. Guido Stache on 

 " Die Klippen bei Lnblau und Jerembina." He soon secured an 

 appointment on the paid staff of the Survey, on which he remained 

 till 1872. He was engaged mainly in the Tyrol, the Vorarlberg, 

 and the Carpathians, and it was no doubt the work during this 

 period that fixed the bent of Neumayr's genius, as, after facing for 

 four years the great geological pi-oblems connected with those 

 districts, it was impossible for him to settle down as merely a 

 laboratory palaeontologist. At the same time Neumayr was not 

 indifferent to the mountains for their own sake : he soon became a 

 keen climber and an energetic member of the Deutscher und Oester- 

 reich Alpin Verein ; in spite of the many calls upon his time, he 

 served for a year as secretary to this, the greatest of the Alpine Clubs, 

 and only withdrew from the rolls of officers on his return to Germany 

 in 1872. Though in later years heart disease prevented his active 

 participation in Alpine work, he followed it with unflagging interest, 

 and was to the last a fairly regular contributor to the Mittheilungen 

 of the Deutscher und Oesterreich Alpin Verein. 



In 1872 Neumayr resigned his post on the Austrian Reichsanstalt, 

 and returned to Heidelberg; but in the succeeding year he was 

 recalled to Vienna as Extraordinary Professor of Palaeontology, a 

 chair then created. In 1874 he made a geological excursion to 

 Northern Greece and the iEgean ; he climbed Atlios and Olympus, 

 and worked out and described the sequence of schists, gneisses and 

 marbles of which the former mountain is composed. In 1879 he 

 was appointed to the Ordinary Professorship at Vienna, a post he 

 held till his death. 



Though Neumayr's scientific work was executed in but little over 

 twenty years, it was unusually fruitful in interesting results. His 

 writings may be divided into three classes : First, his more popular 

 works, such as his well-known " Erdgeschichte " (1887), and some 

 of his papers on mountain structure, such as that recently issued on 

 " Bergstiirze." Secondly, his petrographical and stratigraphical 

 papers beginning with his " Petrographischen Studien iiber mittleren 

 und oberen Lias Wurtembergs " (1868 and 1870), and his "Dogger 

 und Malm in Penninischen Klippenzug" (1869) ; besides a series on 

 the Jurassic, there are his " Das Schiefergehirge der Halbinsel 

 Chalkidike und der thessalische Olymp " (1876); and a valuable 

 series giving the results of his iEgean tour, published. in 1881 ; later 

 still his paper " Die krystallinischen Schiefergehirge in Attika " 

 (1884). shows that he always retained his interest in petrographical 

 problems. 



The papers of the third class, the more strictly palaeontological, 

 form a very lengthy list, touching on most divisions of the Animal 

 Kingdom. The groups upon which Neumayr wrote most frequently 

 were the Jurassic Cephalopods and the freshwater Mollusca of the 

 Vienna basin ; but valuable papers stand to his credit on the Fora- 

 minifera, Ccelenterata, and Eehinodermata ; his first memoir on the 

 last group, " Morphologische Studien iiber fossilen Echinodermen," 

 was an especially original and suggestive piece of work. Nor did 



