150 



OBITUARY NOTICE : 

 EDGAR ALBERT SMITH, I.S.O. 



By J. COSMO MELVILL, M.A., D.Sc. 



(Read before the Society, Sept. 13th, 1916). 



After a severe illness of some duration, we have to mourn one 

 standing in the very foremost rank of malacologists, in the person of 

 Edgar Smith, so well known to and honoured by all who have, 

 during the best part of fifty years, sought his ever-ready help and 

 guidance at the British Museum of Natural History. 



The third and youngest son of the late Mr. Frederick Smith, for 

 many years Assistant-Keeper of the Zoological Department, British 

 Museum, who died in February, 1879 (the leading authority on 

 British Hymenoptera, and a former President of the Entomological 

 Society of London), he possessed, indeed, a hereditary instinct, and, 

 from the very outset of his career, followed in the paternal footsteps, 

 soon becoming an adept, firstly in those branches of natural science 

 in which his father reigned supreme, and exhibiting a readiness to 

 grasp the knotty problems of critical differentiation and variation. 

 Hardly ever, if ever, have the conclusions he had so carefully arrived 

 at in his subsequent molluscan studies been questioned ; his descrip- 

 tive and other work will, we are confident, remain unassailed — an 

 imperishable monument of his acumen and accuracy of detail. 



Born on 29th November, 1847, he was barely twenty years of age 

 when he entered upon his duties at the Museum as an assistant in 

 the Zoological Department in 1867, a few years antecedent to the 

 retirement of Dr. John Edward Gray, F.R.S., the then Keeper of 

 Zoology, a household word in almost every branch of natural science, 

 including the moUusca. 



• Sir Richard Owen, K.C.B., F.R.S., was still Superintendent of the 

 whole Natural History Department, and for long his influential 

 energies had been directed towards a great scheme for the removal 

 of these collections to a National Museum to be erected in South 

 Kensington. Indeed the building had commenced., with Mr. Alfred 

 Waterhouse as architect, but was not finally complete and opened to 

 the public till 1881. 



In 1866-7 the vast collections of shells formed by the late Hugh 

 Cuming, during his world-wide travels, were purchased for the nation 

 for ;^6,ooo ; and one of the first duties of the young assistant was to 

 enter upon the examination, begin the cataloguing, and further the 

 arrcingement of these large accessions to the existing collections, 



