Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/385

Rh to the scientific development of Great Britain during the Victorian era. A life of Flower or of one of t lie other scientific leaders of I he period written On the lines of Mr. Morley's great 'Life of Gladstone' would certainly be more valuable to the world than a personal memoir. While we have no right to demand such a biography from Mr. Cornish, we may regret that the memoir is from the scientific side superficial and even inaccurate. For example it is recorded in the title page that Flower was 'Late Director of the Natural History Museum, and President of the Royal Zoological Society.' Flower was in fact director of the Natural History Department of the British Museum and president of the Zoological Society of London.

Flower was born in 1831, his father being a brewer of Stratford-on-Avon, who spent his youth in America. As has been the case with many scientific men, Flower's early education was irregular; he was as a boy devoted to natural history, learning to stuff birds at the age of ten and establishing a 'museum.' He secured a medical education at University College, London, and served as a surgeon in the Crimean war. He married in 1858 the daughter of Admiral W. H. Smyth, an astronomer, one of whose sons became eminent as an astronomer and one as a geologist, while a daughter married the