46 Obituary. 



glorious music — should fall down and worship the kettle-drum and 

 fiddle-stick. — [Taken in part from Tall Mall Gazette, Oct. 26, 1866]. 



In the February Number of this Magazine, Professor Huxley will 

 describe a new Saurian AcanthopMlis horridus from the Chalk-marl. 

 It is allied to Scelidosaurus, Hylceosaurus, and Polacanthus. — E.E. 



OBITTJ-A.ia"3r. 



We have to deplore the untimely loss of a young and most promising 

 paleontologist, Henry Adrian Wyatt-Edgell, who died of dip- 

 theria, at Belfast, Nov. 6, 1866, aged 19, He had become dur- 

 ing the last few years well known to collectors and students of the 

 older fossils, and his talents and zeal bade fair to place him in a very 

 prominent position in geological circles, when the results of his close 

 study should be given to the world. He had not yet published more 

 than a paper or two, one of which will be found in the present 

 Number, at p. 14, and another in Vol. III. p. 1 60.' But his acumen 

 and industry in this, his favourite pursuit, would assuredly have 

 given him a high title to consideration had his young life been 

 spared but a little longer. 



Ensign Wyatt-Edgell was bom May 17, 1847. He was the 

 second son of the Eev. Edgell and the Hon. Henrietta Wyatt-Edgell 

 of Stanford Hall, Leicestershire. At a very early age he was placed 

 at the College of St. Louis, Paris, where before he was eleven 

 years old he was honorably distinguished for classics ; he acquired 

 his first taste for geology from the teaching of Mr. Charles D'Orbigny. 

 In 1858 he left the College of St. Louis, and afterwards passed three 

 years at Eton, where he distinguished himself in mathematics, and 

 completed his education at Sandhurst, entering second on the 

 examination list. He obtained a commission without purchase in the 

 59th Eegiment, from which he exchanged into the 13th. In the last 

 six or seven years of his short life his whole leisure was given to 

 the collection and study of the Silurian and Cambrian Fossils. In 

 this wide and almost unoccupied field he had the friendly assistance 

 of several feUow-students, and willingly devoted himself to this 

 special group of rocks as most needing illustration. He visited 

 every available locality ; and his polished manners and winning 

 address gave him ready access to every cabinet. The testimony 

 of his friend, Mr. Salter, with whom he studied a good deal, is, that 

 for sound judgment of species and acute and critical observation of 

 their characters he was quite exceptionally eminent. Nothing 

 escaped his eye ; and he was no less happy in the power of general- 

 ization in respect of generic groups and the relation of cognate forms. 

 To this power he added the charm of a classic taste, which rendered 

 his correspondence and descriptions remarkably correct and clear — 

 no mean gift, in these days of slovenly diagnoses. Several fossils 

 will be found to bear his name : e.g. Homalonotus EdyelU, etc. ; and 



1 See also a paper by him on the characteristic fossils of the Arenig group, and its 

 distinction from the Llandeilo, in Geol. and Nat. Hist. Eep. for July, 1866. 



