Ixvi Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 
instruction. ‘Thus he was one of the active founders of the Firth College, out 
of which the Sheffield University has sprung, and the benefactions made by 
him during his life to that institution have been supplemented by a generous 
legacy in his will. It was in the rooms of the Literary and Philosophical 
Society, however, that he appears always to have found the most congenial 
company. For more than half a century he was the most active and 
useful member of that body. He was always pleased to communicate to 
it accounts of the progress or results of his researches, whether carried on in 
the laboratory or on board of the yacht. The jubilee of his connection with 
the Society was fitly celebrated in November 1898, by the presentation 
to him of his portrait as a token of personal esteem and a recognition of his 
world-wide fame as a man of science. This portrait, which now hangs on 
the Society’s walls, has been well reproduced in autotype. It is an excellent 
likeness, which will serve to perpetuate the features of one of the most 
distinguished of the geologists of the Victorian era. 
Ae G. 
SIR JOSEPH FAYRER, 1824—1907. » 
Sir JOSEPH FAYRER was born at Plymouth on December 6, 1824, and died 
at Falmouth on May 21,1907. His father was a naval officer who served 
under Lord Cochrane, Marryat the novelist being one of his messmates. On 
his mother’s side he was descended from John Copeland who took David, King 
of Scots, prisoner at the battle of Neville’s Cross. His childhood was spent 
in the Lake District where he knew Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge and 
John Wilson (better known as Christopher North), the editor of ‘ Blackwood’s 
Magazine.’ At the age of fifteen he began to study engineering, but he was 
very anxious to go to sea, and, as he was too old for the Navy, he made several 
voyages on a merchant vessel. On one of these he visited Bermuda during 
an epidemic of yellow fever, and became so much impressed with the 
importance of the medical profession that he determined to enter the medical 
service of the Navy, and accordingly commenced his studies at Charing Cross 
Hospital in 1844. One of his fellow students, with whom he contracted a 
warm friendship, was Thomas Henry Huxley, and this friendship, to a great 
extent, determined Huxley’s career. In the chapter of autobiography prefixed 
to his Essays, Huxley says: “I was talking to a fellow-student (the present 
eminent physician, Sir Joseph Fayrer) and wondering what I should do to 
meet the imperative necessity of earning my own bread, when my friend 
suggested that I should write to Sir William Burnett, at that time Director- 
