xxxii Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



published by himself and Professor Martin in 1875, needed supplementing by- 

 just such an atlas as Howes had supplied, " which, while starting from part of 

 the work with which he has been occupied in our laboratory, contains so 

 many accurate and well-devised additional illustrations that it will be hardly 

 less useful to students who are engaged in the laboratory than to those who 

 work independently of it." 



In 1889 the course of elementary biology above mentioned was itself 

 revised and extended by Howes in collaboration with his friend Dr. 

 Dukinfield Scott, and in 1895 he edited and annotated the translation of 

 Wiedersheim's ' Bau der Menschen.' Besides these services to scientific 

 literature, his pen yielded some forty original contributions, of which a 

 catalogue is given in the ' Proceedings of the Linnean Society ' for the present 

 year (1905). The longest and most important of the series is that which he 

 wrote, in conjunction with Mr. H. H. Swinnerton, ' On the Development of the 

 Skeleton of the Tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus, with Remarks on the Egg, on 

 the Hatching, and on the Hatched Young.' Material for this treatise was 

 supplied him with generous zeal by Professor Dendy, who used with great 

 success his point of vantage for procuring it, while holding the chair of biology 

 in the Canterbury College of the New Zealand University. Eggs of this 

 interesting animal, which is supposed to be " the sole surviving representative 

 of an early and widely ancestral amniote type," were brought over, with tender 

 care, from New Zealand by Mrs. Dendy, and were incubated in the laboratory 

 of the Royal College of Science. Three out of the six precious specimens ran 

 the full developmental period. The young Sphenodons made good their 

 own escape by help of the horny shell-breaker with which Nature has 

 provided them, and led an observant and apparently contented life for three 

 or four months. They then succumbed, it is thought, as occasionally happens 

 with animals far higher in the scale of existence, to the effects of over-feeding 

 or of feeding at a time when they ought to have been asleep. Hospitality was 

 unthinkingly prolonged by their friends into the period which these lizards 

 or lizard-like creatures should normally have spent in peaceful hibernation. 

 Among the results arrived at by their elaborate treatise, Howes and 

 Swinnerton consider that they have added " fresh testimony to the belief in 

 the batrachian affinities of the living Sphenodon," while strengthening the 

 demonstration of its chelonian resemblances and extending them to the 

 Plesiosauria. " Sphenodon," they say, "judged from our standpoint, must be 

 regarded as the surviving representative of that group of animals ancestral to 

 all the living Sauropsida, and to at least the Dinosauria, Pterodactyla, and 

 Ichthyosauria of the past, if not of the Mosasauria and Dolichosauria also, 

 and unquestionably intimately related to the Anomodontia." They recall the 

 view, much earlier advanced by Howes,* " that a sharp distinction may be 

 drawn between the coraco-stemum of the Batrachia (an ar cluster num), and the 

 costal-sternum of the Amniota (a neostemum), the existence of which in any 

 Batrachian or Stegocephalian has not been proved." In the succeeding para- 



* ' Nature,' vol. 18, p, 269, 1891. 



