ROMANES, GEORGE JOHN British biolo gist, was born at Kingston, Canada, on May 20, 1848. He was educated at Gonville and Caius college, Cambridge, and early formed an intimate friendship with Charles Darwin, whose the ories he did much during his life to popularize and support. When studying under Sir J. Burdon Sanderson at University college, London, in 1874-76, he began a series of researches on the nervous and locomotor systems of the Medusae and Echinodermata. The results were published in Jelly-fish, Star-fish, and Sea-urchins (1885). In 1879 Romanes was elected F.R.S. Meantime he had been also devoting his attention to broader problems of biology. In 1881 he published Animal Intelligence, and in 1883 Mental Evolution in Animals, in which he traced the parallel develop ment of intelligence in the animal world and in man. He followed up this line of argument in 1888 with Mental Evolution in Man, in which he maintained the essential similarity of the reasoning processes in the higher animals and in man, applying Darwin's theory of evolution to the development of the mind. From
1886-90 Romanes delivered a course of lectures on "The Philos ophy of Natural History" at Edinburgh, and was Fullerian pro fessor of physiology at the Royal Institution from 1888 to 1891. In 1892 he brought out an Examination of Weismannism, in which he upheld the theory of the hereditability of acquired char acters. In 1890 he settled at Oxford, where he founded a lecture ship to be delivered annually on a scientific or literary topic. In 1893 he published the first part of Darwin and after Darwin, a work dealing with the development of the theory of organic evo lution, and physiological selection, first propounded in a paper contributed to the Linnean Society in 1886, which provoked much controversy; a second part appeared in 1895 after his death, which occurred at Oxford on May 23, 1894 ; the third part is still unpublished.
His Life and Letters, by his widow, appeared in 1896; his essays were edited by C. L. Morgan (1897). He was also the author of a number of poems, a selection from which was published in 1896.