xlii Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



death of Sir Julius Von Haast, when he became, in addition, Lecturer on 

 Geology, and had temporary charge of the Canterbury Museum. Soon after, 

 on the resignation of Mr. Forbes, he was permanently appointed Curator of 

 the Museum. Thereupon he resigned his professorship of Biology, but con- 

 tinued to lecture on geology till about three years ago, when he found the 

 strain of lecturing in addition to his museum work pressing too heavily 

 upon him. 



For nearly forty years he had been constantly engaged with his various 

 official duties, and had never revisited England, but early in the year 1905 he 

 was granted six months' leave of absence, and he left New Zealand in March, 

 full of anticipation of the pleasure he would have in renewing old 

 acquaintances and of meeting personally the many scientific friends whom 

 he already knew so well by correspondence ; but owing to a breakdown in 

 his health soon after his arrival in England, these pleasurable anticipations 

 were only in a very slight degree realised. 



Such, then, is a brief outline of what may be called Captain Hutton's 

 official life ; but this only covers a small part of his activity : during these 

 busy years he found time to prepare and publish a long list of papers and 

 works embodying the results of original research, which he contributed 

 to the scientific journals of New Zealand, Australia, and Europe. Many of 

 these, as already stated, deal with geology, but a far larger number are 

 devoted to zoology, and they cover practically every class of animals from 

 mammals to protozoa, and it can safely be said that no other New Zealand 

 zoologist will ever be able to cover so wide a field. Indeed, Captain Hutton's 

 work has made this unnecessary, and at the same time impossible. When he 

 arrived in New Zealand he found its zoology practically untouched ; some of 

 the birds and more conspicuous animals had, indeed, been collected and 

 described by various scientific expeditions that had visited New Zealand ; 

 but even of these little was known, and all the others were unnamed and 

 unknown. To the task of describing these, Captain Hutton set himself with 

 determination and enthusiasm, and not only did he possess the. necessary 

 knowledge and skill required for the commencement of the work, but he had 

 also the rare faculty of self-development with his work, and of acquiring new 

 methods of research and investigation as they were needed. 



From his pen there came in rapid succession descriptions and catalogues 

 of fishes, mollusca, Crustacea, worms, echinoderms, sea-anemones, and insects 

 of all kinds. Many of these appeared in the ' Transactions of the New 

 Zealand Institute,' to which he has been a constant contributor from the 

 commencement, and many of his catalogues were issued as separate publica- 

 tions. As the result of his labours, aided to some extent by that of his 

 students and others, whom he started and encouraged in the same task, the 

 preliminary work of naming and classifying the animals of New Zealand has 

 been to a great extent completed, and it is a great satisfaction to all zoologists 

 that he was able, with the assistance of several co-workers, to publish in the 

 early part of 1904 an ' Index Faunae Novae-Zealandiae ' — i.e., a complete list, 



