4G Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. 1860—1906. 
It must not be thought for a moment that Weldon was desultory in his work. 
As E. R. Lankester says in a letter to the writer : " His absolute thoroughness and 
unstinting devotion to any work he took up were leading features in his character." 
He pursued science, however, for sheer love of it, and he would have continued to 
do so had he been Alexander Selkirk on the island with no opportunity for 
publication and nobody to communicate his results to. He never slackened in the 
total energy he gave to scientific work, but having satisfied himself in one quest, 
he did not stay to fill in the page for others to read ; his keen eye found a new 
problem where the ordinary man saw a cow-pasture, or a dusty hedgerow, and he 
started again with unremitted ardour to what had for himself the greater interest. 
The publication of his researches will show that it is not we who are the losers, 
because he went forward, regardless of publication and finality of form. The true 
function of such a man is not to write text-books or publish treatises, it lies in 
directing and inspiring a school, which will be trained by completing the work and 
carrying out the suggestions of its master. The curse of the English educational 
system is that it leaves such men to solitude, and throngs the chambers of those 
who cram all nature into the limits of the examination room. 
In the summer the present writer was at East Ilsley, some seventeen miles 
from Oxford, and there was cycling out several times a week ; the writer's chief 
work was on other than biometric lines and broken by other claims on his time, 
but there was steady joint work on the determinantal theory of inheritance 
as outlined by Weldon, and it is hoped that it is sufficiently advanced to be 
completed and published (37). Weldon had in August, 1905, given to the 
Summer Meeting of the University Extension in Oxford a lecture on Inheritance 
in Animals and Plants (38), and this had taken up some of his energy during the 
summer vacation. On the whole, however, he worked persistently at the Inheri- 
tance Book. It is too early yet to say definitely how far it can be considered ready 
for press, but a considerable number of chapters are completely ready, and there 
are drafts for several others. We can only hope that this, the work he was 
in many respects best fitted for both by direct experiment and by study of the 
labours of others, will be issued in his name and show the full measure of his 
activities during these last few years. 
It cannot be denied that those who were often with Weldon during the last 
two years were occasionally anxious — the pace had been too great — but at no time 
had one definitely realised that there was an immediate anxiet}'. His intellectual 
activity was never apparently diminished, and his long cycling rides were main- 
tained to the end. It was an occasional, but never long persistent, lack of the old 
joyousness in life which was noticeable. At East Ilsley he was full of keenness 
over his photographic work ; he enjoyed an antiquarian investigation into the 
probable final locus of the bones of St Birinus with a view to testing a local legend ; 
we examined carefully a human skeleton dug up from under a sheepfold, the 
authorities having determined that no inquest was needful, the bones being those 
of an old man who died " hundreds of years ago." " And you think ? " said 
