Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. 1860—1906. 
9 
miles in the day, the activity in debate, the vigour in lecture, the flow of thought 
and talk to the midnight hours, realised that the man was not of iron physique, 
and had indeed but small reserves of strength. To see Weldon keen over a piece 
of work was to believe him robust and ready for any fray ; but looking back on 
the past one can see what each piece of work cost him, and the strain on a highly 
nervous temperament began in even those early Cambridge days. 
y IV. Wanderjahre. 
With the Tripos Weldon 's LehrjaJire closed and, as his nature directed, the 
Wanderjahre began without any interval of rest. Immediately after his Tripos, 
Weldon started for Naples to work at the Zoological Station. We have seen that 
at Cambridge he had been a pupil of F. M. Balfour's, whose death from an Alpine 
accident in the July of 1882 was the greatest loss British zoology had sustained 
for years. The charm of Balfour's personality had aroused the affection of all who 
attended his classes, and had awakened a keen desire to follow, even if but a 
long way behind, in his footsteps. In those days the stimulus given by Darwin's 
writings to morphological and embryological researches was still the dominating 
factor amongst zoologists, and Weldon threw himself at first with ardour into the 
effort to advance our knowledge by morphological methods. In Naples he began 
his first published work, a "Note on the early Development of Lacerta muralis" {\), 
but at the same time did much miscellaneous work on marine organisms. The 
lizard paper was finished in the winter at Cambridge, Weldon gratefully acknow- 
ledging the help of Adam Sedgwick, in whose laboratory he was then working. 
Anticipation in the publication of some of the results by C. K. Hoffmann, who 
had been working at the same points, caused a not unnatural disappointment. 
In September Weldon was back in England at the Southampton meeting of the 
British Association. Here Adam Sedgwick, who had succeeded to the teaching 
work of Francis Balfour, invited Weldon to demonstrate for him. Thus the 
winter found Weldon in Cambridge again, and from Sedgwick's laboratory was 
issued the next piece of work: "On the Head-Kidney of Bdellostoma, with a 
suggestion as to the Origin of the Suprarenal Bodies" (2). Weldon hoped to 
show that " at all events in Reptiles and Mammals, the connection between the 
Wolffian body and the suprarenal is much more intimate than has generally been 
supposed," and he followed the matter up in the next year by publishing his paper 
" On the Suprarenal Bodies of Vertebrates" (3). 
Meanwhile a great change had come over Weldon's personal life. On March 14, 
1883, the anniversary of his parents' wedding-day, he was married to Miss Florence 
Tebb, the eldest daughter of William Tebb, now of Rede Hall, Burstow, Surrey, 
which formerly, after he left Merton, had been the house of Walter Weldon. The 
Weldons and Tebbs had been intimate friends for many years, and Miss Tebb had 
been at Girton while Raphael Weldon was at St John's. At Cambridge the new 
Statutes had just come into force, marriage was the order of the day, and houses 
were even difficult to procure. The Weldons on their return from a tour in France 
Biometrika v 2 
