sultory, his constitution being delicate, and his faculties slow in development. After reading for a time with a tutor, he entered in October 1867 at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, obtaining in the following year a science scholarship there. He graduated in the second class of the natural science tripos in 1870. Under the influence of Professor Michael Foster, he then worked at physiology, Francis Maitland Balfour [q. v.] being a fellow-student. An early wish to take holy orders was abandoned, and after winning the Burney prize at Cambridge in 1873, for an essay ‘On Christian Prayer and General Laws,’ he for a time read mathematics. Possessed of ample private means, he was under no necessity of working for a livelihood, and ultimately resolved to devote himself to scientific research. Darwin noticed an early contribution made by him to ‘Nature’ (viii. 101), and sent him an encouraging letter. This proved the foundation of a friendship which profoundly affected Romanes's studies, and lasted till Darwin's death.
From 1874 to 1876 Romanes studied under Professor (Sir) John Burdon Sanderson in the physiological laboratory at University College, London, and dated thence his first communication to the Royal Society, on ‘The Influence of Injury on the Excitability of Motor Nerves.’ He counted the advice, the teaching, the example, and the friendship of Professor Burdon Sanderson as among the most important determinants of his scientific career. In addition to the stimulus he received from Darwin in biological speculation, he was specially encouraged by him to apply the theory of natural selection to the problems of mental evolution. Darwin himself entrusted him with unpublished matter on instinct.
While associated with Professor Sanderson, Romanes initiated a series of researches on the nervous and locomotor systems of the medusæ and the echinodermata. He conducted his observations in a laboratory which he built for the purpose at Dunskaith on the Cromarty Firth. The first-fruits of this investigation were communicated to the Royal Society through Professor Huxley, and Romanes also made his results the subject of the Croonian lecture, which he was appointed by the Royal Society to deliver in 1876; the paper was published in the ‘Philosophical Transactions.’ In the same year he read a paper before the British Association at Glasgow. A second paper, in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ followed in 1877, and a third, which concluded the researches on the medusæ, in 1880. In the investigation on the echinoderms Romanes was associated with Professor Cossar Ewart, and their joint work formed the subject of the Croonian lecture for 1881. These researches, the results of which were subsequently set forth in a volume of the ‘International Scientific Series’ (‘Jelly-fish, Star-fish, and Sea-urchins, Nervous Systems,’ 1885), established the position of Romanes as an original worker in science, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1879. Near the close of his life he contributed to the society a summary of an experimental inquiry on ‘Plant Excitability,’ showing that amid other work his interest in physiological investigation had not diminished.
Meanwhile other problems, scientific and philosophical, occupied his mind. At the Dublin meeting of the British Association in 1878 he delivered a lecture on ‘Animal Intelligence,’ by which he became known to the wider public that is interested in general scientific questions rather than in special lines of research. This lecture formed the starting-point of an important investigation. In 1881 he published in the ‘International Scientific Series,’ under the same title that he had given to his Dublin lecture, a collection of data, perhaps too largely anecdotal, respecting the mental faculties of animals in relation to those of man. This work was followed in 1883 by another on ‘Mental Evolution in Animals’ (with Darwin's posthumous essay on instinct), and in 1888 by the first instalment of ‘Mental Evolution in Man,’ dealing with the ‘Origin of Human Faculty.’ Further instalments, dealing with the intellect, emotions, volition, morals, and religion, were projected. Other lines of work, however, intervened, and the design was never completed. The keynote of the whole series is the frank and fearless application of the principles of evolution as formulated by Darwin to the development of mind.
In addition to his special researches in physiology and mental evolution, Romanes interested himself in the progress and development of the theory of organic evolution. A lecture on this subject delivered at Birmingham and Edinburgh was published in the ‘Fortnightly Review’ (December 1881), and republished as a volume in the ‘Nature Series.’ This essay, ‘On the Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution,’ may be regarded as the germ from which were developed his course of lectures on ‘The Philosophy of Natural History,’ delivered at Edinburgh (1886–90) during his tenure of a special professorship, founded by Lord Rosebery, and his subsequent course on ‘Darwin
