Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. xli 
Hill, and his co-editor came down later to Longcot, a mile away, for the joint 
vacation. Weldon, still hard at work on the Studbooks, was intellectually 
as keenly active as of old; and was planning the lines of his big memoir on 
coat-colour in horses, and showing how they illustrated the points he had 
already found in the mice. 
This extraordinary mental activity was now telling upon a constitution 
never very robust, but the end came with startling suddenness. A day or 
two of slight illness at Woolstone, which, as usual, he made nothing of, was 
followed by a visit alone to London on Wednesday, April 11. Here he was 
taken seriously il, and within a few hours he died of pneumonia, on Good 
Friday, April 13, 1906. 
So passed away, not unfitly—for it was without any long disabling illness 
and in full intellectual vigour—a man of unusual personality, one of the most 
inspiring and loveable of teachers, the least self-regarding and the most 
helpful of friends, and the most generous of opponents. 
And lastly, as to Science, What will his place be? The time to judge is 
not yet. Much of his work has still to be published, and this is not the 
occasion to indicate what Biometry has already achieved. The movement he 
aided in starting is but in its infancy. It has to fight not for this theory or 
that, but for a new method and a greater standard of logical exactness in the 
science of life. To those who condemn it out of hand, or emphasise its 
slightest slip, we can boldly reply, “ You simply cannot judge, for you have 
not the requisite knowledge.” To the biometrician, Weldon will remain as 
the first biologist who, able to make his name by following the old tracks, 
chose to strike out a new path—and one which carried him far away from his 
earlier coileagues. It is scarcely to be wondered at if those he joined should 
wish to see some monument to his memory; for he fell, the volume of life 
exhausted, fighting for the new learning. 
