Obituary notices of fellows deceased
Charles William Andrews was born at Hampstead in 1866, and died in London on May 25, 1924, having spent his active official life in the service of the British Museum. He was a graduate in both arts and science of the University of London, and began his career as a schoolmaster. His main interest, however, was in biological and geological research, and in 1892 he was fortunate in being the successful candidate in a competitive examination for an assistantship in the Department of Geology in the British Museum (Natural History). Here he soon began to add original investigation to his curatorial duties, and he eventually became one of the foremost exponents of vertebrate palæontology. Dr. Andrews at first paid much attention to the fossil birds, of which a useful general catalogue had just been published by Lydekker. He made himself well acquainted with the osteology of birds, and so was adequately equipped for dealing with the large collections of bones of extinct birds which were then being discovered in the surface deposits of lands in the southern hemisphere. In his earliest paper, published in the Geological Magazine in 1894, he described some limb-bones of the largest known running bird from Madagascar, which he named Aepyornis titan . In subsequent years he made several important contributions to our knowledge of both the Aepyornithes and the fossil carinate birds of Madagascar. At the same time he studied the extinct birds of New Zealand, and a large collection of fossil bird-bones from the Chatham Islands which Lord Rothschild had obtained for the Tring Museum. He pointed out especially that the occurrence of closely related flightless rails in Mauritius, the Chatham Islands, and New Zealand, did not necessitate a former connection between those widely separated lands. The rails might have become flightless independently in the different restricted habitats, and an almost flightless rail, Nesolimnas , among the fossils from the Chatham Islands seemed to show that in this form the wings were actually being reduced on the spot. Dr. Andrews also published important new observations on the remains of the Stereornithes and other remarkable extinct birds, discovered by Ameghino in Patagonia, which were received by the British Museum in 1896. To the end he retained an interest in all fossil remains of birds, and his descriptions of an ancestral tropic-bird, Prophaethon , from the Eocene London Clay of Sheppey, and a sternum of the largest known flying bird from an Eocene formation in Nigeria, are especially noteworthy.