Abstract
ON December 23, Prof. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson completed the fiftieth year of his tenure of a professorial chair; for he was appointed professor of biology in the newly founded University College of Dundee in 1884. Fresh from the biological renascence in Cambridge under Michael Foster and Frank Balfour, the young professor found in Dundee every possible kind of discouragement, scanty endowment, mean and unsuitable buildings-and the depressing atmosphere of an industrial city. The title of his chair was soon changed to that of zoology, and in the closing years of the century the incorporation of the College in the University of St. Andrews, and the establishment of a medical school, brought a small increase in the number of his students. In 1917, on the retirement of his senior colleague, Prof. W. C. M'Intosh, D'Arcy Thompson was transferred to the chair of natural history, which he still occupies, in the United College at St. Andrews. Fortunately, the time has not yet come to sum up or to pass judgment upon D'Arcy Thompson's achievements. His innumerable friends, however, and his pupils-none too numerous, alas!—will join with us in congratulating him on the jubilee of his professorship. Few men of our time have been so much at home in both the fields of the old and the newer learning. He is, we believe, the only holder of a chair of science who has been president of the Classical Association, and there must be many among those that have passed through his class-room, who found in an elementary course of lectures on zoology at least the beginnings of a liberal education.
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Prof. D'Arcy W. Thompson, C.B., F.R.S.. Nature 135, 59 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135059b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135059b0