In memoriam Ch. Bayer

CHARLES GUSTAVE FRANCOIS HUBERT BAYER was born at The Hague on January 31, 1887. Part of his youth was spent in France, where he attended the lessons of a Lycée at Nice. Later he returned to the Netherlands and studied two years at the State Flighschool for Agriculture, Horticulture and Forestry at Wageningen. Then he settled at Bennekom (province of Gelderland), where he had bought an estate and started to reclaim land for practising agriculture, forestry, and the rearing of cattle. Thus he was engaged from 1911 to 1917, when financial adversity obliged him to give up further enterprise in this direction. Then he resolved to become a biologist. After having passed the government examination ”gymnasium b” he was entered as a student at Leiden University in September 1921, together with his wife, formerly Miss A. C. L. CLUMPER. He finished his studies by taking his doctor’s degree on June 28, 1929, on a thesis, written in Dutch, on ”the biology of Pseudococcus adonidum (Linn.) Westw.” Meanwhile he had been an assistant of professor P. N. VAN KAMPEN, then director of the Zoological Laboratory of Leiden University, for three years. When on September 1, 1929, BAYER was appointed curator of the Molluscan Department of the Leiden Natural History Museum, he was 42 years old and had never before specialised in Mollusca. Besides the ordinary daily occupations connected with managing a large collection he started a revision of the material of some groups of gastropods present in the museum. Of these groups he published catalogues in which all the known species were listed and the samples present in the Leiden Museum were enumerated. Nine such catalogues, comprising the families belonging to the Doliacea (Tonnacea), the Solariidae (Architectonicidae), and the genera Melongena and Semifusus, were published from 1932 to 1952.