lx PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETT. [vol. lxXV, 



tology at Cornell, and became full Professor there in 1SS6. Six 

 years later he succeeded Dana as Silliman Professor at Yale, but 

 returned to his former post at Cornell in 1904. He retired on 

 pension under the Carnegie foundation in 1912. and died at Havana 

 (Cuba), on July 31st, 1918, at the age of 71. He devoted 

 himself principally to intensive studies of the Devonian rocks of 

 the Eastern States and their fauna, but always with the view of 

 distilling from them such essential principles as might promise to 

 be of wide application. He published over 90 papers and books, 

 the majority of which bore more or less closely upon strati graphical 

 questions of classification and synchronism arising from the study 

 of faunal relations. By minute and prolonged examination of 

 numerous typical sections in the Devonian rocks he became con- 

 vinced that the composition of a fossil fauna changes in passing 

 geographically from one place to another, and that the line of 

 succession in fossil faunas is often not directly vertical in the 

 strata but is deflected laterally, so that the local disappearance of 

 a fauna is no proof of its extinction, and ' not only lithologic but 

 palaeontologic facts are local.' His broad philosophical outlook is 

 dispkyed in his well-known treatise ' Geological Biology : an 

 Introduction to the Geological History of Organisms/ published in 

 1895. This quality, combined with an extreme patience and 

 thoroughness in research, was the hall-mark of all his work. Pos- 

 sessed as he was with high ideals, the sincerity of his aims was 

 recognized by all who knew him, and will be a lasting influence on 

 his students and colleagues. 



By the untimely death of Edward Alexander Xewell Arber, 

 M.A., Sc.D., in his 48th year, our Science has been deprived of an 

 energetic and accomplished investigator in the field of Paleo- 

 botany, whose achievement was already great and was steadily 

 expanding. He was born in London on August 5th, 1870, and, 

 after an ailing boyhood, during which his inherent bent for botany 

 was aroused by a stay in Switzerland, he entered Trinity College, 

 •Cambridge, in 1895, where, despite ill-health, he took the two 

 parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1898 and 1S99, specializing 

 in Botany and Geology. Immediately afterwards he was appointed 

 University Demonstrator in Paleobotany, and thenceforward 

 devoted himself whole-heartedly to the studies which lasted as 

 long as strength remained. Under his care the collection of fossil 

 plants in the Sedgwick Museum grew rapidly in size and importance, 



