Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/522

518

followed, including work on the Patagonian vertebrates, and much attention was given to the collections of the museum. Wide influence was exerted by his less technical writings in paleozoology and organic evolution.

Giard was born in 1846 in Valenciennes; like Gaudry and so many other naturalists, he was eagerly interested in nature and in collecting as a child. He became professor of natural history at Lille in 1873, and in 1888 there was established for him at the Paris Sorbonne a chair of "evolution of organic beings," a valuable step that should be followed by other universities. In the meanwhile, Giard had in 1874 founded at Wimereux, near Bologne, a marine biological station from which there have been issued not fewer than fifty volumes containing a vast amount of important research. His own work covered nearly the whole range of the biological sciences and extended to botany. Perhaps his work on parasitology is best known, but his researches are encyclopedic in their extent, equally at home in minute details and in broad theories.