336 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
R. H. Traquair, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S. By John Horne, LL.D., F.R.S. 
(Read Marcli 3, 1913.) 
By the death of Dr Traquair this Society has lost one of its most dis- 
tinguished Fellows, and one of the prominent leaders of his time in fossil 
ichthyology. The record of his early days may be briefly told. He was 
born at the Manse, Rhynd, Perthshire, in 1840, and received his school 
education in Edinburgh, where, as a boy, he followed the impulses of a 
born naturalist. He set himself to collect shells, butterflies, and moths, and 
he hammered the Carboniferous rocks in search of fossils. In his later life 
he often remarked that his keen interest in fossil fishes was first aroused 
when hammering the ironstone nodules of the Wardie Shales, which re- 
vealed to him a fragment of a Palaeoniscid fish. Even at that early stage 
the ambition seized him of devoting his life to research in the field of 
natural science. With this object in view he passed through the medical 
curriculum in Edinburgh University and graduated in medicine. His skill 
as a dissector attracted the notice of Professor Goodsir and Sir William 
Turner, who was then Senior Demonstrator in Anatomy, which led to 
his appointment as one of the demonstrators in that department. At 
Goodsir’s suggestion he studied the asymmetry of the flat fishes and 
chose this subject for his medical thesis, for which he was awarded a 
sold medal. This elaborate memoir, which still remains a model of 
exact description, was subsequently published in the Transactions of the 
Linnean Society. 
In 1866 he became Professor of Natural History in the Royal Agri- 
cultural College, Cirencester; in 1867, Professor of Zoology in the Royal 
College of Science, Dublin; and in 1873 he was appointed Keeper of the 
Natural History Collections in the Museum of Science and Art, Edinburgh 
— a post which he held till his retirement in 1906. The last of these 
appointments gave him the chance in life which he eagerly desired. He 
had chosen palaeichthyology as his special line of research. He came to a 
Museum enriched by the Hugh Miller and other collections. The labours 
of Hibbert, Hugh Miller, Fleming, C. W. Peach, Powrie, and others had 
proved the abundance of fossil fishes in the Old Red Sandstone and Carboni- 
ferous systems in Scotland. The department which he served gave him 
the means of acquiring many of the best specimens for the Museum. Few 
men have such opportunities, but it was extremely fortunate for Scottish 
palaeontology that they fell to a man whose methods of studying the 
