140 Obituary — Professor H. A. Nicholson. 



Palaeontology, largely rewritten and so increased by tlie addition 

 of new naatter as practically to be considered a new book. 



In the Summer session of 1878-9, Professor Nicholson delivered, 

 at the request of the Senate of the University of Edinburgh, the 

 course of Natural History lectures, in the stead of Professor Sir 

 Wyville Thomson, incapacitated by illness, and he also conducted 

 the course during the two following sessions. On the resignation 

 of Sir W. Thomson, Nicholson became a candidate for the Chair, 

 but Professor Ray Lankester, now the Director of the British 

 Museum of Natural History, Cromwell Road, received the appoint- 

 ment, which he shortly after renounced, and the position was then 

 given to Dr. Cossar Ewart. By many of the friends of Professor 

 Nicholson, the slight shown to him by his own University in thus 

 passing over his undoubted superior claims as a teacher, was 

 attributed to the influence of a small faction, whose opposition was 

 stirred up by the independence of Nicholson's views as to the all- 

 sufficiency of the Darwinian theory of Evolution. 



In 1882 Professor Nicholson accepted the appointment of Regius 

 Professor of Natural History in the University of Aberdeen, which 

 he held for the remainder of his life. In addition to his official 

 work, he still continued his researches on fossil Corals and Monti- 

 culiporoids, and contributed several papers on these organisms to 

 the Annals and Magazine of Natural History and to the Geological 

 Magazine. Some of these papers were written in conjunction with 

 Dr. A. H. Foord and Mr. R. Etheridge, jun. But the most im- 

 portant original work produced at this time was the monograph of 

 the British Stromatoporoids published by the Pal^ontographical 

 Society (1886-1892). The seventh edition of the Manual of 

 Zoology, which had been wholly recast and almost entirely re- 

 written, appeared in 1887, and two years later a third edition of the 

 Manual of Palaeontology, in which the additions were on a still more 

 extended scale, was published. In this edition the first volume, 

 containing the " General Introduction " and the " Palaeontology of 

 Invertebrates," was the work of Professor Nicholson, whilst the 

 second was written by Mr. R. Lydekker. 



Coming to a more recent period, the passing into law of the new 

 University Ordinances in Scotland involved a large amount of extra 

 work in connection with the reorganization of the University classes, 

 and to this object Nicholson devoted all his available energy, to the 

 entire exclusion of original research, which he looked forward to 

 resuming at a future opportunity. As part of the revised system, 

 he introduced courses of lectures on Systematic and Practical 

 Geology and advanced laboratory work in the same science, and 

 he voluntarily undertook this geological teaching without extra 

 remuneration. Such practical zeal on behalf of his favourite science 

 was not lost on his students, for the numbers attending the 

 geological course increased from twenty when first started to eighty 

 at the end of three or four years. 



Professor Nicholson's al»ility as a teacher and lecturer was pre- 

 eminent. It has been said of him by an old friend that he was 



