1913-14.] Obituary Notices. 271 
tinual correspondence. Moreover, to his fellow- workers, such as Charles 
Darwin and A. Russel Wallace, he was of much service in the chapters on 
the distribution and classification of Fishes, Amphibians, and Reptiles. 
The memoir on Geratodus in the Philosophical Transactions is one of 
special interest, as it details the structure and relationship of a Dipnoan 
fish, the ancestors of which were separated by the long gap between the 
present and the Devonian and Carboniferous periods. Yet the persistence 
of type, as pointed out by Dr Gunther, is most remarkable. Further, those 
early representatives were not the beginners of a series, “ but the last of 
many preceding developmental stages.” 
His labours in the British Museum resulted in the issue of eight volumes 
of the Catalogue of the Fishes, a work of immense research, patient in- 
vestigation, and accurate description. In this work (4000 pages) he pays 
a tribute to Johannes Muller’s ordinal arrangement, though he was not 
satisfied that the coalesced pharyngeal bones are of sufficient importance to 
unite the Acanthopterygii and Malacopterygii into one order. An idea of 
the vast labour spent on this task may be obtained by glancing at the 
number of species dealt with, no less than 6843 being well established, 
whilst 1682 others are doubtful. The carrying out of this gigantic task in 
the cellars of the old British Museum in Bloomsbury shows the indomitable 
energy of the investigator as well as his thorough grasp of the subject. It 
is indeed doubtful if such a task will ever again be attempted on the same 
lines, at least without the physical collapse of the investigator. Two 
volumes of a Catalogue of Batrachia salientia and Colubrine snakes 
complete the series of ten volumes. Moreover, the Ray Society published 
his fine work, with numerous illustrations by Ford, on the Reptiles of British 
India. His daily work in the British Museum ranged over snakes from 
West Africa and South America to those from Siam and Australia ; fishes 
from the most recent British dredging expeditions, those from fresh waters 
in every quarter of the globe, and from the neighbouring seas ; amphibians 
from widely distant regions ; birds and mammals from diverse localities, 
and often of great interest. Amongst his other works are the Challenger 
volumes on the shore and deep-water fishes collected in the great expedition. 
The subject of the deep-sea fishes had long been of special interest to 
Dr Gunther, and we may imagine the delight he felt in the study of no 
less than 266 species belonging to this category— many of weird form, with 
remarkable sensory appendages and phosphorescent organs. As he himself 
has stated, the Challenger series laid a broad and sure foundation to our 
knowledge of the abyssal fish-fauna, and he incorporated all the most 
recent work of the Norwegian, American French, and British investigators 
