Henry Nottidge Moseley, F.R.S

Abstract

I HAVE been asked to write for the readers of NATURE some account of my dear friend Moseley, who, after an illness which removed him from all active life and work for more than four years, died at Clevedon, in Somersetshire, on November 10. He was only fortyseven years of age; and when seized with the illness which necessitated his retirement from active life, was at the zenith of a wonderful career of scientific productiveness and value. He had for six years held the Linacre Professorship of Human and Comparative Anatomy in the University of Oxford; and by his great energy and commanding talent had succeeded in collecting around him a most promising band of younger men devoted to the investigation of embryological and morphological problems. Baldwin Spencer, Gilbert C. Bourne, S. J. Hickson, and G. Herbert Fowler, were his pupils, and have shown by their numerous published works the value of the teaching and impulse which he gave to them. In the early days of his illness (1887), he was cheered by receiving from the Royal Society the Royal Medal, in recognition of the value of his researches on Peripatus, the Hydrocorallinæ, the Land Planarians, and the Chitons. The blow caused by his serious illness was felt not only in the scientific and social life of Oxford, but in many other centres. We missed his valuable and practical help in carrying to completion the Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association, of which he had been a, most active and enthusiastic promoter; in the editorship of the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science I found myself once more deprived of the aid of my most valued comrade, as I had been but a few years previously when Frank Balfour died. The readers of NATURE and of the Athenœum missed his varied and always strongly-original contributions; and the Zoological, Anthropological, and Royal Societies had to regret his absence from their meetings and Councils. Moseley had, moreover, at this time made it a practice to give evening lectures in the larger provincial towns as well as in London: from all quarters came expressions of the deep regret which his retirement from public work excited. The amount and variety of work in which he engaged, in addition to the remarkable and extraordinarily minute course of lectures and laboratory work provided by him for his pupils, were certainly more than was wise for him to undertake. But it was a strange and to him a disastrous fact that he never felt tired. He was an exceedingly strong man, and I never saw him fatigued either by physical or mental exertion,