XXIV 



good judgment and wide experience, Sir Philip Egerton was of great 

 assistance at the meetings of any body of which he was a member, 

 and his loss is deplored not only by the councils of more than one 

 learned society but by a large circle of attached friends. 



Professor Rolleston's death, which took place at Oxford on 

 June 16, may well be called premature, as he was in the prime of life, 

 and but a few months before seemed to all, except a few closely 

 observant intimate associates, still in the plenitude of his powers, and 

 capable of much good work in time to come. 



The son of a Yorkshire clergyman, he was born at Maltby on 

 July 30, 1829, and had therefore not completed his fifty-second year. 

 His early aptitude for classical studies, carried on under the instruc- 

 tion of his father, must have been most remarkable if, as has been 

 stated in one of his biographies, he was able at the age of ten to read 

 any passage of Homer at sight. He was not educated at one of the 

 great public schools, but entered at Pembroke College, Oxford, took a 

 First Class in Classics in 1850, and was elected a Fellow of his 

 College in 1851. He then studied medicine at St. Bartholomew's 

 Hospital, joined the staff of the British Civil Hospital at Smyrna 

 during the latter part of the Crimean War, was appointed assistant- 

 physician to the Children's Hospital in London, 1857, but took up his 

 residence again at Oxford in the same year on receiving the appoint- 

 ment of Lee's Reader in Anatomy at Christ Church. In 1860 he was 

 elected to the newly-founded Linacre Professorship of Anatomy and 

 Physiology, which he held to the time of his death. He was elected 

 a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1862, and a Fellow of Merton 

 College, Oxford, in lb 72. He was a member of the Council of the 

 University, and its representative in the General Medical Council, and 

 also an active member of the Oxford Local Board. 



In 1861 he married Grace, daughter of Dr. John Davy, F.R.S., 

 and niece of Sir Humphry Davy, and he leaves a family of seven 

 children. 



The duties of the Linacre professorship involved the teaching of a 

 wide range of subjects included under the terms of physiology and 

 anatomy, human and comparative, to which he added the hitherto 

 neglected but important subject of anthropology, as well as the care 

 of a great and ever-growing museum. In the present condition of 

 scientific knowledge it requires a man of very versatile intellect and 

 extensive powers of reading to maintain anything like an adequate 

 acquaintance with the current literature of any one of these subjects, 

 much more to undertake original observations on his own account. 

 Even a man of Rolleston's powers felt the impossibility of any one 

 person doing justice to the chair as thus constituted, and strongly 

 urged the necessity of dividing it into three professorships, one of 



