Yol. 52.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxxix 



Prof. Dr. Ludwig Rutimeyer, Foreign Member of the Geolo- 

 gical Society of London, was born at Biglen in the Commenthal, 

 Canton Bern, in 1825. His father was a parish clergyman 

 and afterwards Superintendent of the Orphanage at Bonn. Lud- 

 wig was educated in the High School and Gymnasium of that 

 town, and in 1842 went to the University of Bern, where 

 he studied theology, with the intention of following his father's 

 profession. Having developed a taste for comparative anatomy, no 

 doubt partly through the influence of his friend Peter Merian, the 

 Basel palaeontologist, he forsook his theological studies, and took up 

 medicine. Afterwards he visited many of the chief European 

 cities, and in Paris in 1850 he became acquainted with Elie de 

 Beaumont. In 1852 he came to London, which he again visited 

 in 1877. In 1854 he took up academical teaching in the Bern 

 University, but in the following year he accepted the newly- 

 established Chair of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Basel, 

 which he held till his death. 



On the occasion of his second visit to London he spent some weeks 

 in a critical examination of the fossil Bovidce from the Older Pliocene 

 of the Siwalik Hills, India, part of the Palconer and Cautley Col- 

 lection, preserved in the British Museum. 



His first work, ' Vom Meere bis nach den Alpen,' was published 

 on his return from his travels in 1854 ; after this he issued a long 

 series of memoirs, characterized by the great accuracy and detail of 

 their observations, and the wide philosophical grasp and far-reaching 

 deductions made from them. 



Some of the more important of these memoirs are : — ' Unter- 

 suchungen der Thierreste aus den Pfahlbauten in der Schweiz/ 

 1860, in which he gives an account of the earlier races of some of 

 the domestic animals, and shows that while in the Lake-dwellings 

 of the Stone Age the remains of wild animals predominate (proving 

 that the inhabitants lived mainly by the chase), in the later settle- 

 ments, made after the use of metals was discovered, the inhabitants 

 relied chiefly on various domesticated animals for food. 



Another important paper is ' Beitrage zur Kentniss der fossilen 

 Pferde und zu einer vergleichenden Odontographie der Hufthiere 

 im Allgemeinen,' 1863 j this may be regarded as laying the 

 foundation of that detailed comparative morphology of the teeth, in 

 which the homologies of the several cusps are considered, and from 

 which the American palaeontologists have been able to draw very 



