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he would have wished, suddenly, alone in his small bungalow, Charside,Charmouth, at the age of seventy-two, on 19 September 1966. He hadbeen a member of the Association since 1937.

B. L.

DR. WILLIAM DICKSON LANG, F.R.S., was born on 29 December 1878in India, where his father was a civil engineer. He received a largelyclassical education, first at Christ's Hospital and then as a home-boarderat Harrow, and its effects remained in his style of writing and in hisabiding love of Horace and Milton. At heart, however, he was moreattracted by biology, and he read Natural Sciences,specialising in zoology,botany, geology and mineralogy, when in 1898 he entered PembrokeCollege, Cambridge, of which he was Exhibitioner and then Scholar. Hegained a first class in Part I of the Tripos in 1901 and a second class inPart II in 1902, after which he joined the staff of the Geological Depart­ment of the British Museum (Natural History), becoming Deputy Keeperin 1927 and Keeper in 1928. On his retirement in 1938, he went to liveat Charmouth in Dorset, where he died on 7 March 1966. His maininterests lay in two fields: palaeontology, particularly of Polyzoa andcorals, with its problems of evolution, and the stratigraphy and naturalhistory of west Dorset, of which he had an unrivalled knowledge. He waselected a member of the Geologists' Association in 1906 and an HonoraryMember in 1962.

His earliest publication, in 1903, was on the stratigraphy of Dorset,but in his first purely palaeontological paper, in the following year, hewas already considering problems of classification and evolution whichhad arisen in his study of the collections of Polyzoa at the British Museum(Natural History). His first publication on corals was in 1908, and in thefollowing year he began to discuss their evolution also. Thereafter therefollowed a long succession of studies on these two groups, including thetwo volumes (1921 and 1922) of the British Museum catalogue of theCretaceous Cribrimorph Bryozoa (Polyzoa). In 1916 he had propoundedhis theory that 'once calcium carbonate has begun to be deposited thewhole lineage is doomed to a more or less stereotyped sequence of calci­fication until, in the end, it becomes extinguished under its superfluity ofskeleton'. At the same time he became impressed with the parallelism andhomoeomorphy of the lines of evolution in both Polyzoa and corals. Hediscussed homoeomorphy in corals in a report of a demonstration to theGeologists' Association published in the PROCEEDINGS for 1917, and intwo reports of demonstrations published in 1923he discussed programme­evolution and trends in various groups, the trends being internal andrepeatedly expressed in parallel lineages, consequently producing homoeo­morphic forms. Natural selection he considered to be working, meanwhile,

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whenever variations came within its scope, so that evolution is a resultantof internal and external forces. In 1925, in a report of another demon­stration to the Association, he summarised his views on old age andextinction in fossils, showing that unless an organism can counter itsorthogenetic trends it will succumb to them and the lineage will becomeextinct.

He took his Cambridge Sc.D. degree in 1919; from 1923 to 1926 heserved on the Council of the Geological Society of which he was awardedthe Lyell Medal in ]928. In 1929 he was elected a Fellow of the RoyalSociety.

Meanwhile, in the course of war work at the British Museum (NaturalHistory), Dr. Lang turned his attention to entomology, and produced aHandbook of British Mosquitoes . The width of his zoological knowledgewas utilised in his revision of the volume on the Invertebrata in Parker &Haswell's Text-book ofZoology, although he confined himself to revisingthe discussion of the fossil record of the various groups.

In further geological papers he continued to describe and discuss corals(primarily Palaeozoic) and Polyzoa (mainly Cretaceous). Much of hiswork on corals was done in collaboration with Dr. Stanley Smith, and in]940 the Index ofPalaeozoic Coral Genera, by W. D. Lang, S. Smith &H. D. Thomas, was published by the British Museum (Natural History).In 1938, in a report of the last demonstration he arranged for theGeologists' Association, he put forward further considerations on trendsin corals.

All this was, however, but one side of Dr. Lang's life work. He hadfamily connections with Dorset, and a holiday spent at Charmouth in1898 decided much of his future . He met Miss Georgiana CatherineDixon , whose home was there and whom he married in 1908; he wasdeeply attracted to the place itself; and thenceforward his holidays werespent there. During his boyhood he had suffered from heart trouble , andthis prevented his ever undertaking prolonged physical exertion. As aresult, he concentrated all his energies on an intensive study of thestratigraphy, palaeontology and natural history of the area which laywithin easy walking distance of Charmouth. This classic area of LowerLias, in which the beds are magnificently exposed along the coast, hemapped inch by inch, and his 'Geology of the Charmouth Cliffs, Beachand Fore-shore' was published as two complete parts, one text and theother maps, of the PROCEEDINGS for 1914. The Council Report for thatyear described the maps, on the scale of 25 in. to the mile, as 'an importantadvance in the illustration of the geology of a selected district'. In subse­quent papers in the PROCEEDrNGS he extended his mapping on the samescale westwards as far as Pinhay Bay beyond Lyme Regis, and, on thescale of 4 in. to the mile, eastwards to Seatown beyond Golden Cap and

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inland into the Vale of Marshwood. He also studied the history of theRiver Char and elucidated the landscape of the Vale of Marshwood andthe dry gaps that separate the hills behind Golden Cap. He publishedfurther studies on the stratigraphy, of which he had an encyclopaedicknowledge.

He led excursions of the Association to the Charmouth district, andin 1930 he joined the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society,of which he was President from 1938 to 1940. For the rest of his life heremained a member of its Council, becoming Vice-President in 1956,and during these last twenty-five years his publications were almostentirely in its PROCEEDINGS. Until a few years before his death he producedan annual report on natural history, and usually at least one annualpaper; these ranged over a variety of topics of local and general interest;many of them were devoted to Mary Anning on whose life he threwmuch light by his researches into local history. He served on the ParochialChurch Council and wrote a history of Charmouth church. His housebecame the place to which all visitors to Charmouth brought theirquestions and discoveries; and his letters, written in an exquisite hand,were filled with interesting and entertaining news of Dorset and of all hisobservations, whether on newts, poplars, ammonites, place-names oranything else that had come to his notice. In the field beyond his gardenhe planted a collection of poplars on which a preservation order has beenplaced since his death. He was survived by Mrs. Lang, who died in 1967,and by their daughter Brenda, who had cared for her parents for manyyears, and by their son Geoffrey.

M.A.A.