274 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



BUSINESS MEETING 

 1 May, 1916 



The Academy met at 8 :23 p. m., at the American Museum of Natural 

 History, Vice-President Ernest E. Smith presiding. 



The minutes of the last meeting were read and approved. 



The Acting Secretary read the following minute prepared by Pro- 

 fessor E. B. Wilson relative to the death of Theodor Boveri : 



Theodor Boveri, professor at the University of Wiirzhurg and one of 

 the most eminent honorary members of this Academy, died in Wiirzburg 

 October 15, 1915, at the age of fifty-three years. A native of Bamberg, 

 Germany, he studied at the University of Munich under Kupffer and 

 Eichard Hertwig and subsequently became privat-docent at that Univer- 

 sity. In 1893 he was called to the University of Wiirzburg, succeeding 

 Semper as Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy and Director 

 of the Zoological Laboratory. Four years ago he was offered the chair of 

 Zoology at Freiburg as successor to August Weismann and later was called 

 to the directorship of the newly established research laboratory of the 

 Kaiser-Wilhelms-Institute at Berlin; but both these offers he declined, 

 remaining loyal to the laboratory which under the direction of Semper 

 and himself had become one of the leading centers of biological research 

 in the world. 



Boveri's place among the illustrious leaders of biology is already 

 assured, though his name is still not widely known outside scientific 

 circles because of the abstruse and unfamiliar character of the researches 

 to which his life was devoted. No investigator of our times has accom- 

 plished more to elucidate the intricate problems involved in the physical 

 basis of heredity and the mechanism of development. His remark- 

 able series of Z ellen-Studien, beginning in 1887 and extending through 

 more than twenty years, illuminated the whole field of cell-division, fer- 

 tilization and maturation of the germ cells. He was the main founder 

 of the theory of the individuality and genetic continuity of the chro- 

 mosomes; and to his memorable researches on dispermic eggs is due the 

 experimental demonstration of the qualitative differences of the chro- 

 mosomes and their significance as primary factors in heredity. These 

 researches, more than any others, opened the way to a cytologicar ex- 

 planation of Mendel's law of heredity, and led him in the last year of 

 his life to advance a highly suggestive new theory concerning the origin 

 and nature of tumors. His work was as masterly in experimental em- 



