Xiv PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May IOO4, 



his constitution for some years, and for which he had undergone 

 more than one operation, at last carried him off on the 9th of last 

 July, in the 61st year of his age. 



Felix Kaerer was born on March 11th, 1825, in Venice, which 

 was then within the dominions of Austria. His father died when 

 he was only four years old, and his mother thereupon removed 

 with him, her only child, to Vienna, where he was educated and 

 where he spent the rest of his long life. After a training in 

 philosophical and legal studies, he received an appointment in the 

 War Department and soon obtained promotion. But his duties 

 there seem to have been little to his taste, and as his mother 

 possessed means which, though not large, sufficed for the modest 

 maintenance of her little household, he determined, when 32 years of 

 age, to abandon an official career and to live an independent life. He 

 had long been fond of stones, and often in his boyhood, to the vexation 

 of his mother, would come home with his pockets full of them. 

 He now gratified this propensity by attending the lectures of the 

 illustrious Suess, who was then a young Docent in the University, 

 teaching palaeontology and geology. In Vienna, men of science 

 who have incomes sufficient to enable them to gratify their scientific 

 tastes, without being tied to a professorship or other official post, are 

 much fewer than they are in this country. There can be little 

 doubt that Karrer's unattached freedom not only enabled him to 

 choose the pathways of research that best pleased him, but gave 

 him a peculiar place among his contemporary geologists and 

 palaeontologists in Vienna. 



He was soon attracted by the fossiliferous Tertiary deposits of 

 the Vienna Basin, and was gradually led to study their minuter 

 organisms, more especially their foraminifera. To enable him 

 to pursue this line of investigation, he obtained the use of a 

 window in one of the halls of the Hofmineralien-Kabinett. His 

 friend Theodor Fuehs, with whom he was so intimately asso- 

 ciated in that institution, relates that Karrers equipment at 

 his window consisted only of a broad board and a few boxes, 

 yet that, with his practical habits and scrupulous orderliness, he 

 was able there to gather together and stow away everything that 

 was requisite for his work, coming day after day as punctually as 

 any official. He sat at that window-board for more than five-aud- 

 twenty years, until the transference of the Collections to the new 

 palatial Museum. ^Nearly the whole of the personal staff of the 



