142 Obituary ^Henry 8topes, F.G.8. 



and whether he intends the word hemera to denote the duration of 

 a subzone. If he does, then I can safely promise that he shall not in 

 future be annoyed by my misuse of the term, for I will take cai-e 

 never to use it except on those infrequent occasions when I want to 

 express the time during which a certain subzone was formed. My 

 chief concern is with the actual stratigraphical unit and the fossils 

 which it contains ; a name for the time-unit may be convenient, but 

 is of quite secondary importance. Hence his redudio ad ahsardum 

 does not trouble me. A. J. Jukes-Browne. 



TonauAY, February Uh, 1903. 



HENRY STORES. 

 Born February 17, 1852. Died December 5, 1902. 



We regret to record the death, on December 5th, 1902, of 

 Mr. Henry Stopes, for many years a Fellow of the Geological 

 Society of London. He was born at Colchester on Feb. 17th, lfc52, 

 and it was perhaps his early association with that ancient place 

 which turned his thoughts to antiquities. When a boy of 8 he found 

 a fossil Echinus in the playground gravel, and after seeking in 

 vain from all he met an explanation of its peculiarities, he took it 

 to bed with him, that he might meditate at leisure in the morning 

 over its meaning. For this he was punished, but the punishment 

 onlj' intensified his interest, and he kept that stone, which became 

 the nucleus of a large geological collection. He early brought 

 together a fine series of Essex Crag shells, part of which is now 

 on loan at the Stratford Museum. While collecting this, he received 

 from a friend, a fellow-collector, a specimen of Pectunculus glycimeris, 

 which the latter had himself taken from the Red Crag at Walton-on- 

 the-Naze, with a rude carving of a human face on it. Mr. Stopes read 

 a short note on this at the British Association Meeting at York, 1881 

 (see Eeport, p. 700). The carving has not been generally accepted 

 as conclusive by all geologists and anthropologists in England, 

 but some French anthropologists have done so. It is mentioned 

 in Keane's " Ethnology," p. 78. Mr. Stopes considered that the 

 carving suggested pre-Glacial man ; ^ he was the first to set to 

 work to disprove or verify it, and it thus determined the direction 

 of his later researches. He took a house near the gravel-pits of 

 Swanscombe, where he made many interesting discoveries, notably 

 that of the association of Palseolithic implements in a sand-bed there 

 with Neritina fluviatilis and other extinct species of shells (see his 

 paper in the Journ. Anthrop. Inst., xxix, p. 302). He has collected 

 an enormous number of stone tools, chiefly Palseolithic. His first 

 paper on "The Salting Mounds of Essex" was read before the 

 Essex Antiquarian Society, Dec. 20th, 1884, and was published in 

 the Essex Naturalist, April and May, 1887. He read many papers 



1 [It must be borne in mind that the drawing on the shell from the Crag of Essex 

 is open to the same objection as is the cut bone of a Cetacean from an Italian 

 Tertiary deposit, also attributed to man's handwork, namely, that both deposits are 

 marine. — Edit.] 



