iS73 SCIENTIFIC WORK AFTER 1870 



429 



Ceratodus Forsteri, was marked No. l of the series of Con- 

 tributions to Morphology, showed that he still had before him 

 the prospect of much anatomical work, to be accomplished when 

 opportunity offered ; but, alas ! the opportunity which came was 

 small, the preliminary note had no full successor, and No. i 

 was only followed, and that after an interval of seven years, 

 by a brief No. 2. A paper " On the Characters of the Pelvis," 

 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, in 1879, is full of sug- 

 gestive thought, but its concluding passages seem to suggest 

 that others, and not he himself, were to carry out the ideas. 

 Most of the papers of this decennium deal with vertebrate mor- 

 phology, and are more or less connected with his former re- 

 searches, but in one respect, at least, he broke quite fresh 

 ground. He had chosen the crayfish as one of the lessons for 

 the class in general biology spoken of above, and was thus 

 drawn into an interesting study of crayfishes, by which he was 

 led to a novel and important analysis of the gill plumes as evi- 

 dence of affinity and separation. He embodied the main results 

 of his studies in a paper to the Zoological Society, and treated 

 the whole subject in a more popular style in a book on the 

 Crayfish. In a somewhat similar way, having taken the dog as 

 an object lesson in mammalian anatomy for his students, he was 

 led to a closer study of that common animal, resulting in papers 

 on that subject to the Zoological Society in 1880, and in two 

 lectures at the Royal Institution in 1880. He had intended so 

 to develop this study of the dog as to make it tell the tale of 

 mammalian morphology; but this purpose, too, remained unac- 

 complished. 



Moreover, though he sent one paper (on Hyperodapedon 

 Gordoni) to the Geological Society as late as 1887, yet the 

 complete breakdown of his health in 1885, which released 

 him from nearly all his official duties, at the same time 

 dulled his ardour for anatomical pursuits. Stooping over 

 his work became an impossibility. 



Though he carried about him, as does every man of like 

 calibre and experience, a heavy load of fragments of inquiry 

 begun but never finished, and as heavy a load of ideas for prom- 

 ising investigations never so much as even touched, though his 

 love of science and belief in it might never have wavered, though 

 he never doubted the value of the results which further research 

 would surely bring him, there was something working within 



