334 OUtuary-^Prof, P. Martin Duncan. 



common sense enabled him to avoid many a pitfall ; his memoir 

 was certainly a most valuable addition to the knowledge of the 

 later Tertiary Corals. This work was followed by a long list of 

 papers and monographs in which he described the Coral faunas 

 (especially the Cainozoic) of England, Australia, Tasmania, India, 

 Java, Arabia, and Malta. His " British Fossil Corals " is probably one 

 of the finest contributions to English Palaeontology ever published by 

 the Pal^ontographical Society ; it was so much more modern in its 

 methods and more thorough in its treatment than the less painstaking 

 work to which it was issued as a Supplement. 



But though Prof. Duncan's interests were probably at first rather 

 zoological than geological, he soon became absorbed in the line of 

 work which he had been led by circumstances to select. He early 

 realized that the detcription of the anatomical structure and the 

 determination of the systematic position of a fossil did not constitute 

 the sole duties of a palaeontologist. With him these were but pre- 

 liminary to the consideration of the affinities of faunas and their 

 bearing on the physical geography of the past. He was a palaeon- 

 tologist in the truest sense of the word, — not a morphologist who 

 happened to study extinct forms, but a geologist who used fossils 

 as a petrologist uses minerals. Hence his early work on the West 

 Indian Corals commenced by a detailed study of their conditions 

 of fossilization and closed by a discussion of their evidence as to 

 the Cainozoic physiography of the Caribbean region ; similarly his 

 later studies of the European Corals led to his striking paper on 

 " The Physical Geography of Western Europe during the Mesozoio 

 and Cainozoic periods elucidated by their Coral Faunas." 



It was probably his desire to check the conclusions yielded by 

 the Corals that led him to take up also the study of the Echinoidea, 

 and as work with these is more definite than with the former, it 

 yielded him some of his most interesting conclusions. He com- 

 menced with the Echinoids of beds, the Corals of which he had 

 already studied ; among the most remarkable were the collections 

 from South Australia, which he described in a series of papers dating 

 from 1864 to 1887. It was apparently his interest in the origin 

 of this fauna, with its mixture of Cretaceous and Cainozoic genera, 

 that led him to turn with such zest to the Indian Echinoids, which, 

 in conjunction with Mr. Sladen, he monographed with great detail 

 and care. 



Of the Mesozoic Echinoidea he studied with especial interest those 

 of the Cenomanian, and by the aid of the small collections of the 

 Eev. W. F. Holland, in Sinai, and Dr. Carter, in South Arabia, he 

 gradually built up the connexion of the European fauna with that 

 of Northern India. And then, by his comparison of those of the 

 Peninsular and Extra-Peninsular areas, he demonstrated the existence 

 of the land barrier that stretched across India and away to the south- 

 west, of which such important use has been made in recent con- 

 troversy. His views on geographical distribution were original and 

 had been carefully matured ; his lecture on " The Formation of the 

 Main Land Masses " showed that he did not accept the view of the 



