WE briefly announced last week the death, on September 27, at Lausanne, of Dr. Oswald Heer, Professor of Botany in the University of Zurich, aged seventy-four years and twenty-seven days. He was born at Nieder Uzwyl, Glarus, Switzerland, August 31, 1809. His whole mind seems to have been imbued from an early age with an intense love of nature, and his devotion to it led him to prefer its study to the discipline of the Church, which he had entered. Heer's early reputation was made as an entomologist, and from 1834 forwards he published many works and papers on entomology, chiefly on Swiss insects, and more especially on Coleoptera, most of which treated exhaustively on the vertical distribution of species in the Alps. Possibly he is best known (as an entomologist) in this country by his monographic work on the beetles of Switzerland, which appeared in 1838–41. In this work he did for the Coleoptera of that country what Frey has more recently done for the Lepidoptera, but, of course, lapse of time has rendered Heer's labours out of date as compared with Frey's. This monograph appeared in two forms, but that which is best known was styled “Fauna Coleopterorum Helvetica,” and extended to over 600 pages. But his attention was soon attracted, perhaps by some fortunate chance, towards the remains of plants which were being disinterred from the Tertiaries to the north of Lausanne and elsewhere on the Lake of Geneva, and his whole energy became absorbed in unravelling and restoring the vegetation of the past, and continued so until the close of a laborious life. In 1855 appeared the sumptuous “Tertiary Flora of Switzerland,” a. work which at once placed him in the first rank as a specialist; and being a prolific and imaginative writer, untiring industry, he has since contributed to palæontology a nearly uninterrupted series of works on his favourite subjects, terminating but last year with the sixth volume of the “Flora Fossilis Arctica.” Few earnest workers have lived to see their work more highly appreciated, and the gratification he must have felt at the substantial honours that were showered upon him for many years, from grants of money to honorary distinctions of the highest order, must have gone far to compensate for a malady which had for several years left him bed-ridden. The high reputation he so suddenly acquired, more especially in England, was doubtless mainly due to the friendship of Sir Charles Lyell, who constantly quoted his works, almost to the exclusion of those of other writers on similar subjects. His quickness in seizing the characters of even fragments of fossil leaves, his aptitude in describing them combined with the boldness of his inductions and a certain grace of diction, centred attention on his work, and unconsciously diverted it from his eminent contemporaries, Unger, Goeppert, Saporta, and Ettingshausen. The place he occupied was unique, and his opportunities were proportionally great; his loss will be felt, for it will be difficult to find workers, as competent, either able or willing to dispose with such rapidity of the constantly increasing material brought from distant, and especially Arctic, expeditions