xxxiv Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



"After this working explanation of the tubular nature of the C.N.S. the 

 next step was the enquiry into the nature of the cranial nerves and, therefore, 

 the double segmentation of the vertebrate body in the head region. Now he 

 was in the midst of the most complex and abstruse problem of morphology, 

 involving every organic system. The resemblances between Arthropods and 

 vertebrates — with Limulus and Ammocoetes as the champions — are indeed 

 numerous and in many cases perplexingly close. Of course, the more Gaskell 

 became absorbed by his research, the more resemblances he saw, many of 

 which are in all probability mere coincidences, or even erroneous. With great 

 intuition and ingenuity he connected them, and in some of the most important 

 cases his argumentation as to their being homologous structures has remained 

 intact. He knew that if but a few are true homologies, his case would be 

 proven, according to all the accepted canons of the theory of descent, and 

 all the rest could be waived aside as incidental convergences, due to 

 correlations, the possible laws of which we are now only just beginning 

 to speculate about. Hence he felt it necessary to defend, so to speak, his 

 whole extended line ; not that the yielding of some point would mean a 

 disastrous breach, but because of the lack of criterion to know which 

 of his many points might prove one of his best assets, viz., an absolute 

 homologue. 



" On the other hand he felt justilied in assuming as most unlikely that 

 representatives of two fundamentally different phyla should have produced so 

 very many close resemblances, so close in function, structure, and relative 

 position as to make it impossible to show them up as heterogenous. He was 

 also fully aware of it that our time-honoured conception of homologies versus 

 analogies and their application to phylogeny are under reconsideration. It 

 is a blow to the comparative anatomist and to the constructor of pedigrees, 

 but all the more interesting since it shows that it is life, function, adaptation, 

 and inheritance, which shape the material, and this being Gask ell's stand- 

 point of view he skilfully worked with the tools of the morphologist as a 

 physiologist. Be his genial hypothesis, elaborate enough for a theory, right 

 or wrong, he has discovered and elucidated many a feature both in vertebrates 

 and invertebrates which without his tireless work would remain still neglected 

 and unexplained. 



" His book, " The Origin of Vertebrates," published in 1908, has made little 

 impression. Partly it is to a great extent a reprint of numerous previous 

 papers and series of essays, partly because, instead of pleading, he did not 

 present his views and the long chain of argumentation in an easy manner. 

 Lastly the idea of our descent from ' some Crustacean-like ancestor ' was so 

 subversive of all the other rival hypotheses (one of which if assumed to be 

 right implies that all the others are wrong) that the unbiassed reader expects 

 at least a clearly summarising explanation why Gaskell considered the older 

 hypotheses not only insufficient but Avrong. 



" He did not choose this line. He had too noble a character, the respecting 

 admiration of his many friends, ever ready to defend his own, willing to give 



