[q.v.] on the geographical distribution of animals (1876). In addition to valuable monographs, including studies of such important types as sphenodon and ceratodus, Günther was the author of an admirable Introduction to the Study of Fishes (1880), a treatise that has been of great value to students. Other notable pieces of work were his great Catalogue of Fishes in the British Museum (eight volumes, 1859–1870), his Reptiles of British India (1864), Fische der Südsee (three volumes, 1873–1909), Gigantic Land Tortoises (1877), and his Deep-sea Fishes of the ‘Challenger’ Expedition (1887), in which he distinguished the chief bathymetrical zones of the ocean by the character of their fish fauna.
Günther was the founder, in 1864, and first editor of the Record of Zoological Literature, an invaluable bibliography of new contributions to the science. He had an important share in the development of the natural history collections of the British Museum, the specimens in which were increased in number from one million in 1868 to two and a quarter millions in 1895. He was responsible for the safe removal of all the collections to their new home at South Kensington in 1883, and for the erection of a special spirit museum for the custody of an extensive series of spirit preparations for the use of students. To him also is due the credit of establishing the zoological library which forms an important adjunct to the national collections. It was his object to stimulate travellers and collectors to visit zoologically unknown regions, and so to help on the exploration of the world, especially of remote islands and inland waters. He was vice-president of the Royal Society for 1875–1876 and president of the biological section of the British Association in 1880; he was also president of the Linnean Society (1898–1901), and received the gold medal of the Royal Society (1878) and of the Linnean Society (1904). He died at Kew 1 February 1914.
Günther was a fine type of the accurate systematic zoologist—learned, indefatigable, and disinterested, with a high standard of workmanship; he was also an accomplished field-naturalist, though the circumstances of his professional life did not bring this side of his equipment into prominence.
Günther married twice: first, in 1868 Roberta (died 1869), daughter of John McIntosh, of St. Andrews; secondly, in 1879 Theodora Dowrish, daughter of Henry Holman Drake, of Fowey, Cornwall. He had two sons, one by each marriage. His elder son, Robert Theodore, was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1896.
A bronze medallion portrait by Frank Bowcher is in the Natural History Museum.
[Günther Family Records, 1910; History of Collections in the Natural History Departments of the British Museum, vol. ii, Appendix, 1912; Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. lxxxviii, B, 1914–1915; private information.]
GWATKIN, HENRY MELVILL (1844–1916), historian, theologian, and conchologist, was born at Barrow-on-Soar, Leicestershire, 30 July 1844, the second son of the Rev. Richard Gwatkin, senior wrangler in 1814 and afterwards fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Henry Gwatkin went up to St. John's with a scholarship in 1863, after seven years at Shrewsbury School. In 1867 he graduated as thirty-fifth wrangler, ninth classic, and third in the moral sciences tripos—an extraordinary feat, which he followed up in 1868 by being placed alone in the first class in the theological examinations. In the same year he was elected to a fellowship at St. John's, and when he vacated this on his marriage in 1874, the college appointed him lecturer in theology. His failure in 1884 as a candidate for the new Dixie professorship of ecclesiastical history, to which Mandell Creighton [q.v.] was appointed, was to some extent compensated seven years later by his election as Creighton's successor. He now took orders, and held the chair, with the attached fellowship at Emmanuel College, for the rest of his life. In 1903 he was Gifford lecturer in the university of Edinburgh. He died at Cambridge 14 November 1916, of a seizure, probably the effect of a street accident in the previous August.
Gwatkin was a man of wide and deep learning. As an historian he possessed a wonderful knowledge of original sources and a singularly keen eye for the vital facts and tendencies of intricate and perplexing periods. His most notable writings were Studies of Arianism (1882), The Knowledge of God (1906), based on his Gifford lectures, and Early Church History (1909). His Church and State in England to the Death of Queen Anne, printed after his death from an unrevised draft, should not be taken into account in estimating his abilities and scholarship. In his last years he gave much of his time to the Cambridge Medieval History, as an editor and a contributor.
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