IV 



Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



county, and then commenced his long connection with the Natural History 

 Museum, first as a palaeontologist, and later as a worker on recent Mammalia. 



Under the auspices of Dr. Henry Woodward, he undertook the preparation 

 of a Catalogue of the Fossil Vertebrates in the British Museum Collection, 

 a publication consisting of four volumes of Mammals (1885-87), two of 

 Keptiles (1888-90), and one of Birds (1891). While doing this he wrote a 

 large number of palaeontological papers dealing with questions arising out of 

 his study of the collections. 



In preparing this work Lydekker was more and more brought into 

 contact with the staff and collections on the Zoological side of the Museum, 

 and when in 1891 Sir William Flower needed a colleague to work up his 

 Encyclopaedia articles on Mammals into a separate volume, he found 

 Lydekker able and willing to help him to do so. The resulting volume, 

 ' An Introduction to the Study of Mammals,' was perhaps the most 

 valuable work bearing Lydekker 's name, and formed for many years the 

 standard work on systematic mammalogy. Nor has it yet been superseded 

 by any other. In a similar way, with Prof. H. A. Nicholson, he prepared the 

 third edition of the latter's ' Manual of Palaeontology,' one of the best 

 text-books on the subject. 



In 1893 Lydekker accepted an offer by Dr. F. P. Moreno, of the La Plata 

 Museum, to go out and examine some of the wonderful series of Mammalian 

 fossils which had been described by Argentine zoologists, especially by the late 

 Senor F. Ameghino, a visit which was of very great interest to him, and 

 largely increased his knowledge of South American fossils. Great discussion 

 had arisen as to the age of the beds in which the fossils were obtained, 

 notably the so-called " Pyrotherium beds," and he adopted the view, now 

 generally accepted, that they were considerably more recent than had been 

 claimed by Ameghino. But in the somewhat embittered polemics between 

 Moreno and Ameghino he declined to take any definite part. 



In January, 1896, Lydekker was engaged to reorganise the Mammalian 

 Exhibition Galleries of the Natural History Museum, which had been up till 

 then in the nominal care of the Assistant in charge of the Mammalia. The 

 latter's time, however, was necessarily so much given to the vast and 

 rapidly increasing study collections that little attention could be paid to the 

 arrangement of the Exhibition, in which Sir William Flower took himself 

 such personal interest. 



This arrangement, which was in force to the end of his life, was a most 

 admirable one, releasing the Museum Assistant from a work which he had 

 not time to do properly, and giving Lydekker an opening of which he took 

 immediate and continuous advantage. As a result, the whole Exhibition 

 series of Mammalia has been completely remodelled and enormously increased 

 in extent and interest, and the specimens better mounted and better labelled. 

 He also similarly rearranged the galleries devoted to Beptilia and Mammals 

 in the British Vertebrate series. The official guides to these galleries were 

 mostly written and revised by him. 



