748 DR. GUSTAVUS HAY. 



president, of the American Ophthalmological Society, and one of the 

 founders of the New England Ophthalmological Society. 



After nearly fifty years of active and successful practice as an oculist 

 at his office in Charles Street, and later in Marlboro Street, he retired 

 in 1904, and died at his home in Jamaica Plain on the twenty-sixth 

 of April, 1908, at the ripe age of seventy-eight. 



Of the teachers under whom he studied during his residence in 

 Cambridge as a Harvard undergraduate and as a member of the 

 Lawrence Scientific School the one who made by far the deepest im- 

 pression on his mind and character was Professor Benjamin Peirce, 

 for whom and for whose favorite science his feeling was ever akin to 

 reverence. Indeed to the end of his life, in spite of his mastery of his 

 profession and his success in its practice, the love of mathematics 

 held first place in his heart; and with him, as with many of the 

 pupils of Benjamin Peirce, it was a romantic love, something that 

 partook almost of the nature of religion. To it he always turned in 

 his leisure moments as a solace and a joy. 



His mathematical library, which was as well selected and almost as 

 large as his medical library, was nearly as much used. 



He was especially interested in the modern investigations into the 

 foundations of geometry, and his one contribution to the Proceedings 

 of the Academy, "On a Postulate respecting a Certain Form of De- 

 viation from the Straight Line in a Plane," was on that subject. 



Naturally his published contributions to science are mainly in the 

 line of his profession : cases reported in the Boston Medical and Sur- 

 gical Journal, contributions to the Archives of Ophthalmology, and 

 numerous papers in theTransactions of the American Ophthalmological 

 Society. 



Of these papers a very considerable proportion are really mathe- 

 matical investigations into optical problems, and one of the most im- 

 portant of them, "On the Position of the Eyeball during the Listing 

 Rotation,' ' — which showed that apparently contradictory results, 

 reached and published by Helmholtz and Donders, which had caused 

 much confusion and controversy among oculists, were really consistent, 

 — might have been written by Poinst. 



Dr. Hay was one of the most kindly and helpful, as well as most 

 modest, of men. A fellow oculist says of him: "I need hardly write 

 to you of Dr. Hay's many sterling qualities or of the esteem and affec- 

 tion with which he was regarded by his colleagues, especially by those 

 who came into close contact with him; and yet I would say a word. 

 He was always ready to give liberally of his time and thought to aid 

 the younger members of the profession who sought his advice. Person- 



