Popular Science Monthly/Volume 45/July 1894/Obituary Notes

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OBITUARY NOTES.

Prof. George John Romanes, author of the work on Animal Intelligence in the International Scientific Series, of the books. Mental Evolution in Animals and in Man, and Jellyfish, Starfish, and Sea Urchins, and of other scientific essays and treatises, died suddenly at Oxford, England, May 23d. He was born in Kingston, Canada, in 1848, spent his boyhood in Europe, and was graduated in Natural Science at Cambridge in 1870. His first scientific writings of mark are a series of papers on the Nervous System of Medusæ. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1879. He held the appointment of Fullerian Professor of Natural History in the Royal Institution, London, and Rosebery Lecturer on Natural History in the University of Edinburgh. He was a personal friend of Charles Darwin; and most of his writings were in development of Mr. Darwin's theories and the doctrine of evolution, or in criticism of them.

Prof. Robert Peter died at his home near Lexington, Ky., on the 27th of April, at the age of eighty-nine. He is well known among the older generation of scientific men for his chemical work in soil analyses in connection with the various geological surveys of Kentucky and Arkansas. He was a contemporary of many of the older men of science, and was for many years personally and officially associated with David Dale Owen in his geological work. He was the oldest medical professor in America; and occupied the chair of Chemistry in the Transylvania University in its earliest days. When that school was removed to Louisville and became the Kentucky School of Medicine, he went with it. At the time of his death he occupied, nominally, the chair of Chemistry in the Agricultural and Mechanical College at Lexington. He was a native of Cornwall, England, and was born in 1805.