ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OP THE PRESIDENT. 55 



is as a palaeontologist that he will be remembered, and, moreover, as 

 one of the few who have not only regarded palaeontology as a science 

 by itself, dependent on both biology and geology, but nevertheless 

 deserving and demanding separate recognition, but who have aided 

 by their work to prove that the claim of palaeontology to be thus 

 recognized was valid. 



Amongst the most important writings of Dr. I^eumayr were a 

 series of monographs on Jurassic and Cretaceous Ammonites, and 

 another series of papers on the succession and relationships of recent 

 and Tertiary freshwater Mollusca. To the study of the latter he 

 was led by the peculiar facilities afforded by successive faunas in 

 the remarkable series of freshwater Tertiary beds that are so largely 

 developed in soulh-eastern Europe. The principal attraction to 

 i^eumayr in both Ammonites and freshwater shells was the oppor- 

 tunity for tracing their descent. From his student's days he had 

 been an enthusiastic supporter of Darwin's theory of the origin of 

 species, and in his earlier works, as in his last and greatest book, 

 '■ Die Stamme des Thierreichs,' of which, unfortunately, only one 

 volume has been completed, he has devoted himself to the task of 

 tracing through the life of former times the same law of evolution 

 as Darwin inferred from that of the existing world. Dr. Neuraayr, 

 I learn from Professor Judd, was in constant correspondence with 

 Darwin, who regarded him with the greatest esteem and attached a 

 high value to his observations. 



Of Dr. Neumayr's papers two, published in 1883 and 1885, 

 deserve especial notice ; one of these treats of the zones of cli- 

 mate during Jurassic and Cretaceous times and the other of the 

 geographical distribution of the Jurassic formation. Both show a 

 wonderful knowledge of palaeontological literature, and a remarkable 

 power of distinguishing the important facts amidst a mass of 

 details. The first-named paper, moreover, is one of the most 

 important contributions to the question of climates in Mesozoie 

 times that has ever been written, for in it the author shows by a 

 mass of evidence, derived mainly from Cephalopoda, that in Jurassic 

 and Cretaceous times the equatorial marine fauna differed from that 

 of the two temperate zones, and the latter from that of the arctic 

 zone, much as the faunas of similar zones differ from each other in 

 the present day. 



Within a week of his death I received from Dr. Neumayr a 

 packet of papers dealing with a variety of subjects and well illus- 

 trating the many-sidedness of his intellect. One was a popular 



VOL. XLVI. e 



