1891.] Scientific News. 411 
more than he did the removal of the natural history collections from 
the historic galleries in Bloomsbury. It is certain none labored more 
strenuously to effect their safe transfer to their new home at South 
Kensington, and the arrangement of the gallery of fossil fishes, con- 
taining the finest collection of fossil fishes in the world, was his especial 
pride and care. Mr. Davies was remarkable for his unaffected sim- 
plicity of manner and modesty of character. He occupied the some- 
what rare position in these scribbling days, of knowing more than he 
wrote, instead of writing more than he knew. Nevertheless, Mr. 
Davies contributed several instructive and interesting papers to the 
Geological Magazine. In one, ‘‘On the Omosaurus,”’ he described the 
removal to the museum workshops of the huge septarian nodules from 
the Kimmeridge clay of Swindon, Wiltshire, and the subsequent devel- 
opment therefrom of the remains of ‘‘ that gigantic British dragon of 
old time,” the Omosaurus armatus of Owen, one of the finest speci- 
mens of its class in the National Museum. The descriptive catalogue 
of the Plistocene mammalian remains from Ilford, Essex, of Sir Antonio 
Brady’s collection in the British Museum, was also from his pen. 
Some rather sensational journalistic articles were published at the 
time about this fine collection, comprising the remains of parts of the 
skeleton of a considerable number of individual specimens of various 
Rhinoceri (2. Zptorhinus), primeval oxen (Bos primigenius), deer, and 
especially of the mammoth (Ziephas primigenius) from the Pleistocene 
deposits of the valley of the Thames. Mr. Davies used to relate that 
for some time afterwards people came to the museum ‘and inquired 
anxiously for the British elephants, and went away quite angry an 
disappointed when they were shown the series of detached bones, not 
in the least realizing that a simg/e bone often sufficed an anatomist for 
the reconstruction of an individual animal. They really seemed to 
expect to see the one hundred and fifty Essex elephants set up all in a 
row. 
Mr. Davies wasa great lover of nature, and enjoyed many a botanical 
ramble over the South Downs; but even when out for a holiday it was 
not easy to keep him long out of a museum. Then nothing delighted 
him more than to pore over a nondescript heap of old bones that every 
one else had given up as hopeless. It was marvelous to watch the 
patience and skill with which he would select and fit such rough frag- 
ments together, and finally build up the limb bone of a rhinoceros or ” 
or the spinous processes of the vertebra of an Iguanodon. Mr. Davies 
will be sincerely regretted by his former chiefs and colleagues, and by 
many friends. His end was doubtless hastened by anxieties concerning 
