XIV 



Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



At Bradford he met his future wife, Emily Pearce, to whom he was married 

 in 1870. Though not scientific, her intellectual and social gifts were, in some 

 directions at least, equal to his own. 



In 1871 L. C. Miall was appointed Curator to the Leeds Philosophical and 

 Literary Society. He had already delivered a course of lectures on geology to 

 the Society and was known to several influential people in Leeds. He must 

 have had Huxley's support, too, in his application, for among his letters of 

 congratulation on obtaining the post was one from Huxley, in which he 

 characteristically remarks that it would be a matter of great satisfaction to 

 him to think that he had in any way contributed " to the putting of an indu- 

 bitably square man into the square hole at Leeds." 



His interests at this time were mainly geological, and he devoted himself to 

 the collection of fossils in the Leeds Museum with the same enthusiasm that 

 he had given to the geological collection at Bradford. He was helped in its 

 re-arrangement by Pengelly, Boyd Dawkins, and others. Later, much help 

 and many specimens were given by A. H. Green. When it was re-arrauged, 

 he wrote a guide to the collection ; in the same way he re-arranged the 

 different collections of birds, insects, antiquities, and so forth, and wrote a 

 guide to each, in which he set forth clearly the general principles of the 

 various subjects. 



Since 1869 Miall had been busy With the investigation of the new 

 Labyrinthodont that had been found in the Low Moor coal mine. The task 

 proved more difficult than he had expected. He was Secretary of the 

 Geological Section of the British Association at Edinburgh in 1871, and a 

 Committee was then formed, consisting of Phillips, Woodward, John Brigg, 

 and three others, with Miall as Secretary, to investigate and compare all the 

 known species of Labyrinthodont. It happened that the following summer 

 John Brigg and his friend, Swire Smith (Sir Swire Smith, whose life has been 

 written under the title of ' The Master Spinner '), decided to go to Germany 

 to look into the German system of education and see for themselves how far 

 such a system would be possible in industrial England. They invited Miall 

 to join them, so that he and John Brigg could combine the investigation of 

 Labyrinthodonts with the educational work, all three being in fact interested 

 in both subjects. 



They had an instructive tour, and the following year (1873), when the 

 British Association met at Bradford, Miall read the report of the Committee 

 on Labyrinthodonta. The work had been very thorough : " Some of the 

 members have personally examined all the more important Labyrinthodonta 

 in European collections, including at least one example of every species 

 recorded from the British Isles." The report created much interest and 

 brought Miall into general notice for the first time. 



Miall was now beginning to concentrate his attention on Biology. He 

 declined the Professorship of Geology at the newly opened Yorkshire College 

 in favour of A. H. Green, a much stronger geologist than he felt himself to be, 

 and henceforth his interest in geology began to wane. He never cared greatly 



