PROFESSOR T. J. PARKER. F.R.S.,—AN APPRE-
[TO THE EDITOR 07 THE " SPECTATOR:]
SIR,—Failing any more complete obituary notice of my dear friend Thomas Jeffery Parker, F.R.S., Professor of Compara- tive Anatomy in the Otago University, New Zealand, and Curator of the Museum, Dunedin, would you suffer me to say how, from a non-professional view, the world is the loser by his sudden and, to us, most untimely removal ? A man of the keenest scientific intellect, as humble as he was accomplished, as patient as he was successful, as loyal as he was enthusiastic, he seemed to me, Sir, to be the very em- bodiment of man's true attitude towards the external world, considered as an object of research and inquiry. During the two years we were resident in Dunedin he was a constant inmate of our house (he read the Lessons for me in church), and we came to know him and to love him, apart from his own personal loveableness, for his crystalline truthfulness and absolute honesty. He helped me beyond all helpfulness in the found- ing of what is now fairly well known as the "Savage Club," Dunedin. No one who listened there to his ten minutes' lectures on the tuatara lizard, the kiwi, the kea, and other kindred subjects, will ever forget the perspicuity, the clear- ness, the tereeness of his 1Fetares, nor the sparkling, good- natured humour with which those lectures were adorned. But it was in his absolute and unmistakeable piety that the true man discovered itself. I know that he knew that the universe was a temple of God, and that he was called by his vocation to minister in it.
For us, who are left behind, he has given a lesson, hard for any to receive, of indomitable cheerfulness and spring, under circumstances of hardship, difficulty, and sore bereavement, and withal of that indomitable faith, of which just now the world seems so sorely to stand in need. It is a great matter to think that one has had the privilege and the responsibility of learning such lessons as these from one who was, and was deservedly counted to be, the moat brilliant pupil of his brilliant master, Professor Huxley.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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