Louis Compton Miall. 



xv 



for mere collection and the minute characteristics of the shells in which 

 animals had lived. He collahorated with A. H. Green, Thorpe, Pucker, and 

 Marshall in a work on ' Coal, its History and Uses/ published in 1878, but 

 his serious interest in geology and palaeontology ended about the year 1880. 

 He never studied petrology, without which much of the recent work cannot 

 be appreciated. 



When Miall refused the Professorship of Geology, the Council of the 

 Yorkshire College still wished to secure him upon its staff, and appointed him 

 the following year (1875) lecturer in Biology, a post which he held concur- 

 rently with his curatorship of the Museum. In 1876 he was made Professor 

 of Biology. Many of his lectures were given in the library of the 

 Philosophical Society, for the Yorkshire College had little accommodation, 

 while there was room and a store of material at the Museum. The professors 

 of the Yorkshire College frequently gave lectures to the Philosophical 

 Society and sat on its Council. Both institutious worked in conjunction with 

 the Leeds School of Medicine, which required courses of Botany and Zoology 

 for its students. 1 



It was in the yard of the Medical School that Miall dissected the Indian 

 elephant which chance gave into his hands. A shed was built over the 

 animal, and there he worked through the cold winter of 1874-5, helped by 

 P. Greenwood, Curator of the Medical School. The memoir on the " Anatomy 

 of the Indian Elephant " appeared in 1879, and was the second of a series of 

 studies in comparative anatomy. The first of the series was the " Skull of 

 the Crocodile," which appeared in 1878, and the third was the " Structure 

 and Life-History of the Cockroach " (1886). There the series ended 

 abruptly, for though a short account of Megalichthys, a ganoid fish of the 

 Coal Measures, was published in 1885, the fourth book of the series, which 

 was to have dealt with that topic, was never written. The author had 

 given so much time to the Cockroach, and had become so deeply interested 

 in it, that all other research had to give way to the structure and life- 

 histories of insects, which occupied him as long as he had vigour and 

 eyesight for the work. 



The book on the Cockroach, published in conjunction with Alfred Denny, 

 was by far the most important piece of work that Miall had done so far. It 

 represented several years of study, begun in the Museum of the Philosophical 

 Society, and carried on at the Yorkshire College and at his own home. It 

 has since been recognised as marking an epoch in the study of insects in this 

 country. In reading up the subject as a preliminary to further research, he 

 had become acquainted with the work of the old naturalists, Malpighi, 

 Swammerdam, Lyonnet and Straus-Durcheim. He found them so fascinating 

 that the first chapter in the " Cockroach " is devoted to them, and the whole 

 book is an exposition of their teaching — a very lucid account of insect 

 structure and development. Its value was immediately recognised by 

 Prof. Huxley who congratulated Miall on the book. 



The " Cockroach " appeared in 1886. In 1887 we find its author already 



vol. xciii. — B. b 



