524 ALONZO SMITH KIMBALL. 



An hour at his workshop was an unusual pleasure, both for the 

 scientific man as well as the ordinary individual, and no one was ever 

 turned away. 



His love for the best literature was intense. Shakespeare and the 

 poets were his especial favorites, and, endowed with a reuiaikably reten- 

 tive memory, he could quote from them almost indefinitely. 



To him death was the inevitable sequel of life, the gate to be opened 

 by a kind and all-wise Providence, and so without i'ear he met the future. 



To make the most superb lenses, in which every slender ray of light 

 shall be forced to brhig its message of stellar history to a focal point, 

 and to see these lenses steadily reach a size only considered possible with 

 each successive achievement, — this was the ambition of Alvan Graham 

 Clark, and in him it found complete fulfilment. 



Oliver C. Wendell. 



ALONZO SMITH KLMBALL. 



Doctor Alonzo S. Kimball, who was for a quarter of a century 

 Professor of Physics in the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, was born at 

 Centre Harbor, New Hampshire, in 1843. lie was prepared for college 

 at New Hampton Academy, and was graduated from Amherst College 

 in 1866. In 1871, he was called to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 

 which had just graduated its first class. He organized the depart- 

 ment of Physics, and the Institute was among the first in the country io 

 provide systematic instruction in a physical laboratory. After seven or 

 eight years of great activity and usefulness, shown alike in the develop- 

 ment of the important department of which he had charge and in a 

 series of valuable original contributions to physical science, he was, in 

 1879, attacked by a painful disease, which, in spite of the highest medical 

 skill in both this country and Europe, proved to be incurable, and from 

 the effects of which he died on December 2, 1897. Notwithstanding 

 the steady progress of a malady wliicli entailed nearly continuous suffer- 

 ing, Professor Kimball through all of these years discharged the con- 

 stantly increasing duties of his position to the great satisfaction of the 

 ofl^icers of the Institute and of his hundreds of pupils, to whom his life 

 and work were always inspiring. In addition to his regular work in 

 Worcester he was for several years a lecturer at Mount Holyoke College, 

 of which institution he was also for many years and at the time of his 

 death a trustee. While the Salisbury Laboratories of the Polytechnic 

 Institute were being built, he spent a year in Europe, engaged in the 



