OBITUARY NOTICE: DR. H. F. BECKER. 



By the editor. 



[For the following details we are indebted to Grocoits Penny Mail, a Grahamstown 

 newspaper]. 



Hermann Francis Becker died at Grahamstown, South Africa, on 

 April 4th last, on his seventy-ninth birthday. He had been a mem- 

 ber of our Society for the last twelve years, and was an indefatigable 

 and successful collector of South African moUusca, especially marine 

 forms. 



He took his degree in medicine at the University of Jena, in 1862, 

 and after residing for a time in Cornwall went to the Cape in 1868 to 

 take up the post of District-Surgeon at Port Alfred. 



In 1874 he removed to Grahamstown, and built up a very success- 

 ful private practice. Having considerable artistic tastes and sympathies 

 he was a strong supporter of the art school and of local art in general, 

 and it was through his instrumentality that the Grahamstown Fine 

 Arts Association was established in 1901 under his presidency — a 

 post he continued to hold till his death. 



In 1886 he was elected to the medical staff of the Albany General 

 Hospital, and held the office of visiting medical officer for twenty- 

 seven years consecutively, and for a year that of consulting physician. 



He resigned in 19x3, and the hospital report for that year empha- 

 sizes the services which he repeatedly rendered to the out-patient 

 department, and the value of his expert knowledge of botany, forestry, 

 helminthology, and other branches of natural history. 



For thirty years he served on the Albany Museum Committee, part 

 of the time as its chairman. 



He was a Fellow of the Linnean Society and of the Society of Arts, 

 and a member of the S. John's Lodge of Freemasons, Grahamstown. 

 He leaves a widow and one daughter. 



Though an ardent conchologist, he never, as far as we are aware, 

 wrote on the subject. Mr. Sowerby described some of his discoveries 

 in vol iv. of the Proceedings of the Malacological Society, pp. 1-7, 

 213-215, and named an Amphiperas, a Columbeila, a Gibbula, and a 

 Solariella after him. 



New Name for Microsetia (preoccupied), — This generic name, proposed 

 by Monterosato in !his Nomencl. Gen. e Spec, p. 74 (1884) for certain Rissoids, 

 is preoccupied by Stephens in Lepidoptera, Cat. Brit. Ins., ii., 207, spp. 7329-54 

 (1829). The name has been applied to Mediterranean and to Cape species. I now 

 propose the new generic name Coriandria for the shell I described as Mio osetia 

 durbanensis {/. of C, xv., 119). — J. R, le B, Tomlin. 



