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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



he did not attend a university. He 

 became interested in science through 

 the local scientific society and museum 

 at Halifax, and received his training 

 through them and through his own 

 work. He accomplished scientific work 

 of accuracy and importance, but was 

 an amateur in the sense that he held 

 no scientific position. Darwin is the 

 most notable instance of the great con- 

 tributions to science made in Great 

 Britain by those having hereditary 

 wealth and devoting their lives to sci- 

 entific work, but he is only one of . a 

 large class, including men of great 

 eminence, such as the two last presi- 

 dents of the Royal Society, Lord Ray- 

 leigh and Sir William Huggins, and 

 many others, such as Sladen, whose 

 work may not be widely known, but 

 is of a high class. It is to be hoped, 

 though scarcely to be expected, that 

 these traditions will be maintained in 

 Great Britain and adopted here, as the 

 number of our wealthy families in- 

 creases. 



Sladen concerned himself in the main 

 with scientific work on the starfishes. 

 In the course of twenty years he pub- 

 lished thirty-five papers, the most ex- 

 tensive being the report on the Aster- 

 oidea collected by the Challenger which 

 describes 184 new species. In an early 

 paper he described an extraordinary 

 form from a single specimen since lost 

 which he placed in a new family inter- 

 mediate between the Ophiurids and the 

 Asterids. Another discovery of evolu- 

 tionary interest was of certain " cribri- 

 form " organs in a family of starfishes. 

 The function of these organs is not 

 known; they appear in one family only 

 with no indication as to how they may 

 have been evolved, their number is 

 fixed for each species, though it varies 

 greatly within the family. 



Though Sladen's scientific work was 



narrowly limited, he was a man of 

 public spirit and wide accomplish- 

 ments. He knew Persian as well as 

 European literatures and was an ex- 

 pert collector and student of old books 

 and manuscripts. He was zoological 

 secretary of the Linnean Society and 

 secretary of several committees of the 

 British Association. His biographer 

 says of him : " Cheerful, humorous and 

 of a remarkably even temper, Sladen 

 presented to his many friends a sin- 

 gularly lovable nature, in which un- 

 selfishness, sincerity and a generous 

 appreciation of the work of others 

 were some of the leading character- 

 istics." 



SCIENTIFIC ITEMS 

 We record with regret the deaths of 

 Dr. Georg von Neumayer, the eminent 

 German meteorologist; of Dr. Wilhelm 

 Engelmann, professor of physiology at 

 Berlin, and of Dr. F. G. Yeo, F.R.S., 

 the physiologist. 



Among those who will have received 

 an honorary degree from Cambridge 

 University on the occasion of the Dar- 

 win centenary are three Americans: 

 Professor Jacques Loeb, of the Uni- 

 versity of California; Dr. Charles D. 

 Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian 

 Institution, and Professor E. B. Wil- 

 son, of Columbia University. 



Dk. Iea Remsen, president of the 

 Johns Hopkins University, has been 

 elected president of the Society for 

 Chemical Industry.— Dr. E. F. Nichols, 

 professor of experimental physics at 

 Columbia University, has been elected 

 president of Dartmouth College. — Mr. 

 Lazarus Fletcher, F.R.S., the keeper 

 of the department of mineralogy since 

 1880, has been appointed to the post 

 of director of the natural history de- 

 partments of the British Museum. 



