Cresswell Shearer died at Cambridge on 6 February 1941. Of Scotch and Irish descent, he was born in Quebec on 24 May 1874, being the youngest of eleven children. Inclined to be delicate in his early years, he combined an interest in natural history with a love of the violin, inherited from his father. It was not until he was twenty-one that he entered Johns Hopkins University to take the special courses in zoology and biology; on his return from Baltimore he entered the medical faculty of McGill University, graduating in 1901. Throughout his life Shearer retained an interest in contemporary medicine, but it was always secondary to his love for academic zoology, to which he devoted most of his active life. Shearer’s career as a zoologist dates from 1901, when he began to work in the biological laboratory at McGill in close association with E. W. MacBride. The visit which they paid to British Columbia was fruitful not only for its scientific results, but also as a source of many an amusing anecdote to be told, by one or other, on future occasions. During the early years of this century descriptive embryology of invertebrate animals was a focal point of biological interest, and it was probably through MacBride and other leaders of American thought that Shearer’s interests quickly turned to the embryological field, leading him in 1903 to the great centre of research at the Stazione Zoologica, Naples. Here he met many of the great figures of late nineteenth-century biology—Boveri, Driesch, Dohrn and many others too numerous to mention.