I8g 4 .] 



THE BRITISH NATURALIST. 



43 



OBITUARY. 



ARTHUR MILNES MARSHALL. 



As the old year waned the scientific world was shocked by the sudden 

 death of Arthur Milnes Marshall, the Beyer Professor of Zoology, in 

 Owens College, Manchester, who was killed whilst enjoying a brief 

 recess from his scientific pursuits in the mountains of the Lake District. 

 An ardent mountain-climber, he was in the habit each year of spending a 

 short holiday amongst the precipices of the Westmoreland mountains to 

 stimulate himself for the more arduous climbing amongst the glaciers of 

 Switzerland. On the last day of the old year, in the morning, with 

 several comoanions, he left the Wastdale Hotel for a few hours' exercise 

 amongst the precipices of Scawfell, and having overcome all difficulties, 

 the party had reached the summit, and were looking for the most 

 promising position to fix the camera for the purpose of photographing 

 some of the most prominent geological features. Professor Marshall had 

 mounted a few feet higher than the others, and had just called to his 

 companions that the place where he stood offered greater advantage for 

 the camera in the more extended view, when the noise caused by the 

 fall of a stone attracted the attention of one of the party, who, on looking 

 up, saw the apparently lifeless body of the Professor rolling down the 

 side of the precipice. The cause of the accident, whether he had 

 stepped on a stone which was insecure, or whether a stone loosened by 

 the action of recent frosts had fallen from above and struck him, will 

 never be thoroughly ascertained ; the melancholy fact only remains that 

 in an instant there was removed from our midst a most promising student 

 of Natural History. That death was instantaneous is beyond doubt, for 

 on examination it was noted there was scarcely a bone of the cranium 

 which remained unfractured, and this fact lends some feasibility to the 

 conjecture that the stone fell from above. 



Arthur Milnes Marshall was born in Birmingham in i852. His father 

 was an engineer, and also enjoyed the reputation of being a Naturalist 

 and Microscopist of no mean order. Prof. Marshall received his early 

 education at a private school, and was entered at St. John's College, 

 Cambridge, in 1871. There he studied Biology, and, obtaining a 

 scholarship in Natural Science in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, he studied 

 medicine, and shortly took his degrees as a doctor, a profession he was 

 apt to regard with feelings anything but satisfactory. His election 

 during the year 1879 t0 tne Beyer chair of Zoology, then newly created, 

 in Owens College, enabled him to devote himself to the study of his 

 favourite science. 



During the years 1877-81, he published in the Journal of Anatomy and 



