18-5 BAELY SCIENTIFIC WORK 15 



biologists who all seemed destined to do good work, 

 and it is melancholy to look back and to see ' how of 

 that not too numerous band a number have been 

 taken from us in the prime of life, Garrod, Frank 

 Balfour, Moseley, H. Carpenter, Milnes Marshall, 

 Romanes.' ^ 



At Dunskaith a httle laboratory was fitted up in 

 an adjoining cottage, and here during the summer 

 Mr. Romanes worked constantly for some years, diver- 

 sifying his labours by shooting. It was in his country 

 home also that he began those series of observations 

 on animals which he worked up into the ' Animal 

 IntelHgence ' of the International Scientific Series, 

 perhaps the most popular of his books. The terrier 

 Mathal was his special companion, and he observed 

 various traits of her inteUigence which are recorded 

 in ' Mental Evolution in Animals,' pp. 156, 157, 158. 

 It was also at Dunskaith that he began his first 

 attempts at verse making, but for some years these 

 did not come to much. 



HJis scientific work at Dunskaith led to a paper 

 communicated to the Eoyal Society in 1875, and 

 entitled ' Preliminary Observations on the Locomotor 

 System of Medusae.' 



This paper the Eoyal Society honoured by making 

 it the Croonian Lecture, an l^onour awarded to the 

 best biological paper of each year.' 



Mr. Romanes had worked for two years, or rather 

 two summers, very constantly and very strenuously on 

 the Medusae. He set himself to try and discover 

 whether or not the rudiments of a nervous system 

 existed in these creatures. Agassiz had maintained it 



1 Prof. E. E. Lankester in Nature, May 1894. 



- But he also communicated a paper to the Eoyal Society entitled, 

 ' The Influence of Injury on the Excitability of Motor Nerves.' Of this 

 paper Professor Burdon Sanderson says that the observations were made 

 with great care, and that the new facts recorded have been fully confirmed 

 by later observers. This work was done at Cambridge. 



