A. C. L. G. Giirdher. 



XI 



July 19, 1908, in his 79th year. He is buried in the burial ground of the 

 Wanstead Meeting House, near Leytonstone, close to the oak tree on which 

 he so often looked out as he sat in Meeting. 



The closing years of his life were clouded for himself, and those who 

 were near him, by his failing health and powers. It is to their recollections 

 (if a son may be permitted so to write of his father) of the strong, wise, and 

 loving man that he was in his prime, still attended by clear glimpses of the 

 " Vision Splendid " and with much of the character, to use another TVords- 

 worthian phrase, of " Nature's priest," that his family and his friends look 

 back for the full evidences of the manner of man he was. 



J. J. L. 



A. C. L. Gr. GUNTHER, 1830-1914. 



Albert Guxther was born in Esslingen, South Germany, on October 3, 

 1830, a descendant of a family which had been in the locality for hundreds 

 of years, the Swabian branch of the Giinthers having settled in and about 

 Mohringen on the Filder Plateau at the beginning of the fifteenth century. 

 His father was " Siftungs-Commissar " in Esslingen, and Estates Bursar in 

 Mohringen, whilst his mother, Eleonora Xagel, was a daughter of a family 

 which oricnriallv came from Bremen, but had been resident in Wurtemburo- 

 for four crenerations.* 



He obtained his early education at the Gymnasium at Stuttgart, and 

 thereafter proceeded to the University of Tubingen, where he spent six 

 years, 1847-52, 1856-7, the intervening years being occupied by attendance 

 at the Universities of Berlin (1853) and Bonn (1854-5). This prolonged 

 student4ife was mainly due to the wishes of his relatives, who, according to 

 family tradition, had destined him for the ministry of the Lutheran Church. 

 He attended, indeed, the Theological College at Tubingen, and passed the 

 qualifying examination. But the young student's bent lay in another 

 direction, and, just as his brother turned to medicine, so he gravitated to 

 natural science, especially after falling under the influence of the renowned 

 Johannes Miiller, who was then in the zenith of his fame, though a fatal 

 accident which had happened to a student on one of his dredging expeditions 

 had seriously affected him. He accordingly, after taking the degree of 

 Ph.D. at Tubingen, in 1852, decided to study science and medicine, choosing 

 zoology as the chief field of his labours, as evinced by his first paper, " Ueber 

 den Puppenzustand eines Distoma," which appeared in the ' Wiirttemberg 

 * 'Gunther Family Records/ Quaritch, London (1910). 



VOL. LXXXVIII. — B. e 



