Ixiii 



was also made Dean of the College, serving actively in that office tij> 

 to the time of his retirement ; indeed, even at the time of his death, 

 he was nominally Dean. In 1881 he accepted, upon j)ressure, the 

 duties of Inspector of Fisheries, which office he held till 1885, 

 bringing at once exact technical knowledge and acute political 

 sagacity to bear on problems of peculiar difficulty, and, as on other 

 occasions, snatching the fruit of scientific inquiry out of the oppor- 

 tunities of routine business. 



In 1880 he had felt it his duty to resign the office of Secretary to 

 the Royal Society, but in 1883, upon the lamented death of "William 

 Spottiswoode, he was called upon, by the united voice of the Society, 

 to fill the Presidential Chair. He gladly undertook the duties, for, 

 as has been said, his ideal of the part which the Society ought to 

 play towards that advancement of natural knowledge for which it was 

 founded was of the highest. He looked forward to so using his 

 position as to develop still further the Society's usefulness, and had 

 in his mind plans for changes of a gradual and judicious kind which 

 might safely bring this about. But it was not to be, the ill-health 

 which had seemed to vanish in the seventies came back now with 

 increased force, and in 1885 he felt himself bound to resign the post. 



Indeed the ill-health now became grave ; the strain caused by the 

 long-continued painful illness of a favourite daughter, ending in her 

 death in 1887, told heavily upon him. Symptoms of cardiac mischief, 

 which had probably been slowly developing for a long time past, now 

 became pressing; and in 1885 he resigned his official duties at South 

 Kensington, retaining the title of Emeritus Professor and, at the 

 solicitation of the authorities, the post, which he had held so long, of 

 Dean of the College. His active connection with the. Survey had 

 ceased about 1881, though up to this time his name still appeared as 

 that of naturalist to it. 



An attack of pleurisy in 1886, followed by another in 1887, raised 

 grave forebodings among his friends ; but judicious care and an 

 innate recuperative power restored him to temporary strength. 

 He found great benefit to his health from occasional visits to 

 Eastbourne, where he afterwards built himself a house, to which he 

 moved in 1890, giving up his London residence. 



His experience as Inspector of Fisheries led him to investigate and 

 write, in 1882, an account of the saprophytic diseases of salmon ; he 

 also contributed short papers to the Zoological Society, and, in 1887, 

 one to the Geological Society, on Hyperodapedon Gordoni, those fossils 

 to which fate had led him against his will occupying his attention 

 almost to the last. But one marked effect of his illness was to 

 produce a condition in which anatomical research became a burden 

 to him. Though he carried about him, as does every man of 

 like calibre and experience, a heavy load of fragments of inquiry 



h 2 



