NOTES 



Professor G. Carey Foster, F.R.S. (A. W. P.) 



By the death of Professor G. Carey Foster, on February 9, 1919, science lost 

 one who had taken a great part in connection with education and with physical 

 measurements. He was appointed Professor of Physics at University College, 

 London, at a time when physical laboratories in the modern sense did not exist. 

 In 1866 he started the first in which students might repeat the standard methods 

 of measurement which were then being rapidly developed (particularly on the 

 Continent, where he had himself received the final part of his training). Other 

 places very rapidly followed suit, for the spirit of change was in the air. Carey 

 Foster (in his own words) looked upon his college not only as an important 

 place of education, but also as an important expression of a most remarkable 

 intellectual movement— a movement which stood for free inquiry and effort towards 

 improvement, intellectual and social. He identified himself with all the move- 

 ments towards making his university a great teaching university, as distinct from 

 a mere examining body, and it was under the stimulation of two or three, of whom 

 he was one, that his college ultimately, in 1907, allowed itself to be swallowed 

 up in the university in order that it might, if possible, work the necessary reforms 

 from inside. He was also a leader in the movement for giving women the same 

 educational facilities and rewards as men. Although to many, at the time, it 

 seemed a most hazardous step to take, yet it was clearly inevitable, and time 

 has justified it. Those who knew him as a man will recall a singularly kindly 

 personality, almost too shy and diffident to be genial, but living at peace with all : 

 too conscious of the changes in scientific theories with the lapse of time to feel 

 definitively bound to any, and with a strong sense that the revelations of experi- 

 ments were the important part of scientific progress. In his writings he had 

 the mastery in a remarkable degree over a lucid and logical prose. 



The Mittag-Leffler Institute (Philip E. B. Jourdain, M.A.) 



An account of the Mittag-Leffler Institute for pure mathematics has already 

 appeared in Science Progress (12, 647, 1918). The Institute was founded by 

 money to be bequeathed after the death of Prof. G. Mittag-Leffler and his wife, 

 and the original idea was that the working of the Institute should only begin after 

 the decease of Prof. Mittag-Leffler. But now Prof. Mittag-Leffler, as I hear from 

 him, wishes to see the beginning of this working, and has, therefore, handed over 

 a capital sum to the Academy of Sciences of Sweden so that the activity of the 

 Institute can begin at the present time on a modest scale. " I already have," 

 writes Prof. Mittag-Leffler, "two scholars endowed with travelling scholarships, 

 and will send them to England as soon as circumstances permit." 



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