Ixiv PEOCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [March 1913, 



shire), in 1840, he received his early education in Edinburgh, 

 where, as a boy, he showed his bent towards natural science. He 

 became a collector of shells, butterflies and moths, and he strolled 

 along the sea-shore to examine the rocks. He was wont to relate that 

 his keen interest in fossil fishes was first aroused when hammering 

 the ironstone-nodules in the Wardie Shales, which revealed to him 

 a fragment of a P.alaeoniscid fish. Thereafter he passed through 

 the medical curriculum at the University of Edinburgh, and 

 graduated in medicine. His skill as a dissector attracted the 

 notice of Prof. Goodsir and Sir William Turner, who was then 

 Senior Demonstrator in Anatomy. This led to his appointment 

 as one of the Demonstrators in that department. At Goodsir's 

 suggestion he studied the asymmetry of the flat fishes, and chose 

 this subject for his medical thesis, for which he was awarded a 

 gold medal. 



In 1866, he became Professor of Natural History in the Royal 

 Agricultural College, Cirencester ; in 1867, Professor of Zoology in 

 the Ptoyal College of Science, Dublin ; and in 1873, he was 

 appointed Keeper of the Natural History Collections in the Museum 

 of Science & Art, Edinburgh — a post which he held until his 

 retirement in 1906. The last of these appointments gave him 

 exceptional facilities for pursuing the study of ichthyology, which he 

 had chosen as his special line of research. He acquired for the 

 Museum a magnificent series of fossil fishes, chiefly from the Old 

 Pied Sandstone and Carboniferous rocks of Scotland. The methods 

 adopted by him while investigating these organic remains revo- 

 lutionized this branch of enquiry. His work was essentially 

 based on morphological structure, and not on the mere outline of 

 the body nor on the configuration of scales and teeth. 



Throughout his long and active career he published nume- 

 rous papers, chiefly on fossil fishes, which have appeared in the 

 Monographs of the Palseontographical Society, the Transactions 

 of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Proceedings of the 

 Royal Society. His researches were of especial significance to the 

 zoologist, by reason of the light thrown, in some conspicuous 

 instances, on the question of evolution. Thus, early in his career, 

 he showed that the Palaeoniscidse were more closely allied to the 

 recent sturgeon than to the existing Lejpidoste-us, with which they 

 had previously been compared. He further pointed out that the 

 Platysomida3 were a specialized offshoot from the Pakconiscidse. 

 The new fish-fauna, discovered by the officers of the Geological 



