Popular Science Monthly/Volume 35/July 1889/Obituary Notes
Mr. Robert Damar, of Weymouth, England, a well-known naturalist and geologist, died May 4th, in his seventy-fifth year. He was an extensive traveler and assiduous collector. Among the collections he made were a series of fossil fishes from the cretaceous beds of the Lebanon, Syria; the most complete specimen of the extinct Steller's sea-cow, from Behring Island; and a series, called complete, of the fishes of the Caspian Sea. He had lately purchased the zoological collections forming the Godeffroy Museum in Hamburg, and had perhaps the largest collection in England of recent shells. He was the author of a work on the "Geology of Weymouth and the Island of Portland." He was contemplating, at the time of his death, another trip to Siberia, to procure an entire mammoth's skeleton.
Among recent deaths of scientific men in Europe are those of the Finnish botanist. Prof. Sextus Otto Lindberg; and Dr. Hermann Theodor Gayler, Director of the Botanical Gardens at Frankfort.
Warren De La Rue, F.R.S., an eminent English physicist, died April 19th, aged about sixty-three years. He was born in Guernsey and educated in Paris; was interested in photographic observations of solar eclipses and of the transit of Venus in 1874; was associated with Prof. Balfour Stewart and Mr. B. Loweny in the publication of "Researches in Solar Physics"; carried on a series of researches on the electric discharge, the results of which were communicated to the Royal Society and the French Academy; was for two years President of the Royal and for eleven of the Chemical Society, and for three years a member of the Council of the Society of Arts; and was a corresponding member of several foreign scientific societies.
Prof. Franz Cornelius Donders, of the University of Utrecht, a distinguished physiologist and ophthalmologist, died March 24th, in the seventy-first year of his age. lie studied in the Netherlands Military Hospital School and the university, and was a professor at Leyden and afterward at Utrecht. He was the author of many works, among them an inaugural dissertation on "Harmony of Animal Life"; "Dutch Contributions to Anatomical and Physiological Knowledge"; "Metabolism of Tissue as the Source of the Proper Heat of Plants and Animals"; treatises in optics, including his great work on "Anomalies of Refraction and Accommodation"; and technical and special essays. He has been called the first surgeon who approached the subject of lenses as aids to vision in a truly scientific spirit.