George John Romanes

George John Romanes (1848–1894) was a Canadian-born British biologist and the closest scientific friend of Charles Darwin's last years. Born in Kingston, Ontario, and raised in London, he studied at Cambridge, worked on the nervous systems of jellyfish and was elected to the Royal Society at thirty-one. His books Animal Intelligence, Mental Evolution in Animals and Mental Evolution in Man founded comparative psychology, and Darwin, and After Darwin, left unfinished at his early death, expounded and extended the theory of natural selection, adding his own theory of physiological selection. He endowed the Romanes Lecture at Oxford, which continues to this day, and died of a brain tumor at forty-six.