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significance clearly and acutely explained ; it also contains, one might 

 say in almost every page of the two thick volumes, the record of 

 original, often laborious inquiries, to which the author was stimulated 

 sometimes for the sake of verifying the statements of other observers, 

 but more frequently for the purpose of solving morphological 

 problems which presented themselves to him as the work went on. 

 Some of the larger results, which thus sprang out of the work, 

 elaborated as inquiries carried oat by himself, or through him by his 

 pupils, were published as separate papers ; but even when these are 

 accounted for, there still remains imbedded so to speak in the work, 

 an enormous amount of original work, in the form both of new facts 

 observed by himself and of luminous interpretations of the facts which 

 others had recorded, but whose true meaning others had failed to see. 



Parts of his vacations were spent in trips or longer voyages, for the 

 sake of health and amusement. In this way he twice visited Finland, 

 and spent a Christmas in Greece ; but he always contrived, even in the 

 midst of his pleasures, to make his holidays help in his work. He 

 paid repeated visits to Naples, and indeed he was from the beginning 

 one of the staunchest and most valuable friends of Dr. Dohrn 

 and of the Statione Zoologica. He was on a visit to his friend 

 Prof. Kleinenberg, at Messina, in the Christmas of 1881, buoyant 

 with the feeling of relief at having completed the Comparative Em- 

 bryology, when, staying at Naples on his way, he found a pupil who 

 had been sent by the University of Cambridge to study at the Statione 

 Zoologica, lying sick of typhoid fever at Capri. With characteristic 

 unselfish tenderness, Balfour set himself to nurse his pupil until the 

 young man's friends could arrive. There can be no doubt that he 

 thus caught the malady, for in January (1882), soon after his return 

 to Cambridge, he himself was laid up with an attack of typhoid fever, 

 which threatened to be severe, but happily passed off well. 



Some time before this great endeavours had been made to induce 

 him to become a candidate for the chair at Oxford left vacant by the 

 lamented death of Professor G. Rolleston, and afterwards he was 

 even more vigorously urged to accept a nomination to succeed the 

 late Sir Wyville Thomson in the chair of Natural History at Edin- 

 burgh, perhaps the best endowed and most conspicuous biological 

 chair in the United Kingdom. He refused, however, to leave his own 

 University, though his position there was simply that of a college 

 lecturer and he had no post in the University itself. Moved by the 

 peril of thus losing one of the brightest and most promising of its 

 alumni, the University, at the instigation of Balfour's friends, took a 

 most unusual step, and the Council, with the approval of the whole 

 University, instituted a new chair for Balfour himself, and in March, 

 1882, he was elected Professor of Animal Morphology. 



On his return from a visit to Naples in the summer of 1876, he 



