574 Obituary — Dr. P. H. Carpenter. 



with regard to the arms of Antedon, and P. H. Carpenter naturally 

 wished to examine Semper's material. Thus his first paper (Journ. 

 Anat. and Physiol.) reconciled the views of his father and of his 

 father's critics. The interest once aroused led him on to the investi- 

 gation of the Phillipine Adinometrce, placed in his hands by Semper, 

 and after two years' work he presented to the Linntean Society the 

 important paper on that genus which is published in their Transac- 

 tions. Meanwhile the Challenger expedition had returned, and in 

 January, 1878, the description of the free-swimming Crinoids 

 collected on it was entrusted to Carpenter by Sir Wyville Thomson. 

 Thus his scientific career was determined, and from that time to his 

 death, a constant stream of papers from his pen, on Echinoderm 

 and especially Crinoid morphology, found their way to the Eoyal, 

 Linngean, Geological, and Zoological Societies of London ; to the 

 Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, the Annals and Maga- 

 zine of Natural History, Zoologischer Anzeiger, and many other 

 publications. 



The report on the Challenger collection of Stalked Crinoids was to 

 have been written by Wyville Thomson, but on his death in March, 

 1882, the work naturally fell to Carpenter. This report, published 

 in 1884, and that on the unstalked forms, which appeared four years 

 later, embody the main work of Carpenter's life : their accuracy and 

 exhaustiveness are known to all who have to deal with Crinoids. 

 This led to much other systematic work, such as that on the ComatulcB 

 of the Leyden Museum, of the Hamburg Museum, of the Parent's 

 and Kara seas, and of the Mergui Archipelago ; besides much left 

 unfinished on the Blake collections from the Carribbean sea, the 

 Crinoids from the Port Philip Survey, from Torres Straits and 

 elsewhere. 



What must strike any one who reads these reports is the constant 

 allusion to fossil forms. The refusal to separate for a moment the 

 animals preserved to us in the rocks from those living in modern 

 seas, which distinguished Carpenter's work from that of most 

 zoologists, constitutes his chief claim on the attention of the readers 

 of this Magazine. " I have," he said " the strongest conviction 

 (and many mistakes would be avoided were it a universal one) that 

 the only way to understand fossils properly is to gain a thorough 

 knowledge of the morphology of their living representatives. These, 

 on the other hand, seem to me incompletely known if no account 

 is taken of the life-forms which have preceded them." And this 

 conviction was acted up to : thus, even a new Antedon from the 

 Mergui Archipelago was shown by him to throw light on the position 

 of Jurassic species. No stronger argument than the extreme value 

 of all Carpenter's palseontological papers can be needed to show the 

 utter fatuity of ever expecting really good work to be done upon 

 fossils by those who are prohibited from acquiring a practical know- 

 ledge of their living relations. For those, however, less fortunate 

 than himself his help was always ready, and none will feel his loss 

 sooner or more bitterly than they who have so often availed them- 

 selves of it in solving the many problems presented by the Crinoids 



