1912-1913-] The Late Ramsay Heathy Traquair. 47 



Street for the sale of birds' eggs, minerals, fossils, &c. The 

 sight of the fossils in her shop first gave him an interest in 

 that subject. He began to collect all the fossils he could 

 come across in the neighbourhood. He made his first " find " 

 of a fossil fish among the ironstone nodules in the shales 

 exposed on the shore at Wardie. During his career as a 

 medical student at Edinburgh University he devoted all his 

 leisure time to the collecting of fossils. He was a good all- 

 round naturalist, but his favourite study was fishes, especially 

 fossil fishes. He took for the subject of his thesis at his 

 medical examination " The Asymmetry of the Flat Fishes," 

 for which he was awarded a gold medal. The thesis was 

 afterwards published in the ' Transactions ' of the Linnaean 

 Society. In 1866 he was appointed Professor of Natural 

 History in the Agricultural College, Cirencester, where he 

 taught botany to agricultural students. Here he published his 

 first paper on fossil fishes, founded on the specimens which he 

 had collected around Edinburgh. He was shortly afterwards 

 appointed Professor of Zoology in the Eoyal College of Science 

 at Dublin, and in 1873 he was transferred to Edinburgh as 

 keeper of the natural history collection in the Ptuyal Scottish 

 Museum. In 1878 he was awarded the Neill medal by the 

 Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was elected a Fellow of the 

 Eoyal Society in 1 8 8 1 , and received the honorary degree of LL.D. 

 from the Edinburgh University in 1893. He was awarded 

 both the Lyell medal of the Geological Society of London 

 and the MakDougall-Brisbane medal of the Royal Society of 

 Edinburgh in 1901. He received the Royal medal of the 

 Eoyal Society in 1907. A list of his scientific papers, which 

 are numerous, is published in the ' Geological Magazine ' of 

 June 1909. He joined this Society in 1894, and was made 

 an honorary member in 1905. The Society is indebted to 

 him for several papers. In 1896 he delivered a lecture on 

 " Popular Delusions in Natural History," which was greatly 

 appreciated by the members, and is published in the ' Trans- 

 actions ' of the Society. His last paper to the Society was on 

 " Snake-like Forms among Vertebrata," and was delivered in 

 1902. 



