Abstract
GEORGE BROOK, whose untimely decease on August 12 we have already chronicled, was born on March 17,1857. He died, therefore, in his thirty-sixth year, apparently from the effects of heat-apoplexy, while on a visit to his wife's family near Nevvcastle-on-Tyne. On the fatal day he joined a shooting party on the adjacent moor; after a successful expedition and a repast in the shooting-box, he was complaining laughingly of the necessity for early rising on such occasions, when his head fell back and he expired without uttering a sound. He was buried at Benwell Church, Newcastle, where, six years previously, he was married to Fanny, second daughter of Mr. Walter Scott, of Riding Mill. He was educated at the Friends' School, Alderley Edge, and, although he afterwards studied for a couple of years under Prof. Williamson and others at the Owens College, Manchester, he may be said to have been, as a naturalist, mostly self-taught. His earlier years of active life were spent in his father's business at Huddersfield, and he turned the experience thus gained to good account in his after career. His first definite association with scientific work dates from his connection with the recently deceased Mr. J. W. Davis, of Halifax, and others, in the prosecution of biological investigation in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was in 1884 appointed scientific assistant to the Scottish Fishery Board and lecturer on comparative embryology to the University of Edinburgh. He retired from the first-named office in 1887, leaving as a legacy a series of valuable notes and reports upon the food fishes, but the last-named one he held till death. As an embryologist, he is himself best known for his work upon the origin of the endoderm from the periblast in teleostean fishes, and although not the first to have suggested this, it must be said, in justice to his memory, that certain recent investigators have reverted to his views without according him befitting recognition. His love of experimental marine zoology, and his personal munificence in the interests of pure science, reasserted themselves in 1889, in his attempt to found a lobster hatchery and marine observatory at Loch Buie,Isle of Mull, duly noted in our pages (NATURE, vol. xlii. p. 399), and which we know to have involved him in a not inconsiderable loss. He was secretary to the Huddersfield Naturalists' Society, and to the Scottish Microscopical Society, of which he was a founder; he was for three years a vice-president of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, and a member of council of the same, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He had recently joined the Zoological Society, and was but a few months ago appointed an examiner in Biology to the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh. In the year 1889 he rose suddenly into fame as the author of the Challenger Report on the Antipatharia. His preliminary paper, dealing (Proc. R. Soc. Edin., vol. xvi. p. 35) with the homologies of the mesenteries in the Antipatharia and the Anthozoa, had apprised the world of the breadth of his inquiry into, and the extent of his knowledge of, this difficult and little understood group; but the preparation, within approximately ayear, of that which came to be termed “one of the most praiseworthy” of all the Challenger reports, set a seal to his reputation, and exalted him to a foremost position among living Actinologists. In this work he elaborated his important discovery of dimorphism (in Schizopathinæ) by division of a single primitive zooid into three, instead of by specialisation of individual polypes; and at the time of his death he had well-nigh completed an important paper dealing with this and kindred subjects, for which his talented assistant, Mr. Binnie, had prepared a large series of beautiful sections and some elaborate drawings. The thorough and conscientious manner in which he had worked out the Antipatharians of the Challenger collection led, in 1890, to his engagement by the Trustees of the British Museum for the arrangement and cataloguing of their very large collection of stony corals; and the present month marks the publication of that which will perhaps rank as his magnum opus, viz., the “Catalogue of the Genus Madrepora,” a quarto volume of 212 pages, with 35 beautiful plates, mostly from photographs taken by himself. This welcome treatise, which was the first of a projected series dealing with the stony corals, like most of the set to which it belongs that have appeared under Dr. Günther's direction, is, in reality, no catalogue at all, but rather a revisionary monograph, founded upon the study of rich material from world-wide localities, which must furnish a basis for succeeding inquiry into the group with which it deals. None but those who enjoyed the deceased author's personal friendship can form an adequate idea of the labour and expenditure, both of time and capital, which he bestowed upon this volume. It is the practical outcome of the last three years of his life's work. The success with which he dealt with the bewildering difficulties before him may be perhaps sufficiently gauged from its “Introduction,” and to what important lines of structural investigation and conclusions the task was leading him, it is obvious from this and his last published paper 'On the Affinities of the Genus Madrepora” (Four. Linn. Soc. Zool. xxiv. p.353).
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George Brook. Nature 48, 420–421 (1893). https://doi.org/10.1038/048420a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/048420a0