he did not attend a university. He became interested in science through the local scientific society and museum at Halifax, and received his training through them and through his own work. He accomplished scientific work of accuracy and importance, but was an amateur in the sense that he held no scientific position. Darwin is the most notable instance of the great contributions to science made in Great Britain by those having hereditary wealth and devoting their lives to scientific work, but he is only one of a large class, including men of great eminence, such as the two last presidents of the Royal Society, Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Huggins, and many others, such as Sladen, whose work may not be widely known, but is of a high class. It is to be hoped, though scarcely to be expected, that these traditions will be maintained in Great Britain and adopted here, as the number of our wealthy families increases.
Sladen concerned himself in the main with scientific work on the starfishes. In the course of twenty years he published thirty-five papers, the most extensive being the report on the Asteroidea collected by the Challenger which describes 184 new species. In an early paper he described an extraordinary form from a single specimen since lost which he placed in a new family intermediate between the Ophiurids and the Asterids. Another discovery of evolutionary interest was of certain "cribriform" organs in a family of starfishes. The function of these organs is not known; they appear in one family only with no indication as to how they may have been evolved, their number is fixed for each species, though it varies greatly within the family.
Though Sladen's scientific work was narrowly limited, he was a man of public spirit and wide accomplishments. He knew Persian as well as European literatures and was an expert collector and student of old books and manuscripts. He was zoological secretary of the Linnean Society and secretary of several committees of the British Association. His biographer says of him: "Cheerful, humorous and of a remarkably even temper, Sladen presented to his many friends a singularly lovable nature, in which unselfishness, sincerity and a generous appreciation of the work of others were some of the leading characteristics."
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the deaths of Dr. Georg von Neumayer, the eminent German meteorologist; of Dr. Wilhelm Engelmann, professor of physiology at Berlin, and of Dr. F. G. Yeo, F.R.S., the physiologist.
Among those who will have received an honorary degree from Cambridge University on the occasion of the Darwin centenary are three Americans: Professor Jacques Loeb, of the University of California; Dr. Charles D. Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and Professor E. B. Wilson, of Columbia University.
Dr. Ira Remsen, president of the Johns Hopkins University, has been elected president of the Society for Chemical Industry.—Dr. E. F. Nichols, professor of experimental physics at Columbia University, has been elected president of Dartmouth College.—Mr. Lazarus Fletcher, F.R.S., the keeper of the department of mineralogy since 1880, has been appointed to the post of director of the natural history departments of the British Museum.
