Abstract
SIR PATRICK GEDDES died at the Collège des Écossais, Montpellier, on Sunday, April 17, at seventy-seven years of age, but still as full of ideas and enthusiasms as a young man. He was born in Perth in 1854, the son of Capt. Alexander Geddes, of the Black Watch, and he retained throughout life his feeling for the Highlands and their memories and survivals of the days before industrialism. Inspired by Darwin' work, he came to study under Huxley, but his primary interest was in the application of Darwinian ideas to the problems of human society, and he increasingly turned to the ideas of Lamarck, Herbert Spencer, and Auguste Comte, and realised his kinship of thought with Bergson. His thoughts were turned in this direction partly through a threat of blindness which, while he was carrying out research in Mexico, made microscope work impossible and forced him to live in a darkened room. Like Weismann in similar circumstances, he turned to thought and its graphical expression in highly suggestive notation systems.
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Sir Patkick Geddes. Nature 129, 713–714 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129713a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129713a0