76 Trofessor George Wilson* 



ments, but, humanly speaking, create occasion for the use of 

 them, was never more clearly illustrated than in the case of Dr. 

 George Wilson. And it is because we know that everything, or 

 nearly everything, connected with the position from which death 

 has just called him, owed its existence to his wisdom, his zeal, 

 and his never flagging energy that we feel his death to be so 

 great a public loss. It will never be possible to estimate with 

 anything like correctness the amount of physical and mental 

 labour which he endured in order to fulfil the objects contemplat- 

 ed in the foundation of his Professorship, and to carry out the 

 projected Industrial Museum of which he was appointed curator. 

 His duties in the class-room, arduous as they were, did not 

 represent a tithe of that labour. The clearness of his mind, the 

 warmth of his heart, the graces of his style, and the natural 

 buoyancy of his temperament, made his duties as a teacher seem 

 as light as they were pleasant. No man better knew how to 

 make the portals of the temple of knowledge inviting, and in a 

 secular as well as a sacred sense, wisdom's ways were ways of 

 pleasantness to him and all whom he sought to teach. Duty, 

 " the stern lawgiver," ever were a smile for him, and his works 

 abundantly prove that while he laboured as comparatively few are 

 capable of labouring to extend the boundaries of knowledge, he 

 never ceased to look forward, with the eye of steady faith, to that 

 state of things in which we shall no longer see darkly as through 

 a glass. It was his delight to think that those who reverently 

 sought to know something of the Creator's work here, had begun 

 studies that would never end, and he was wont to say that '' the 

 shortest lesson in heaven will teach more than the longest upon 

 earth. 



A brief notice like this affords us no opportunity of saying 

 anything satisfactory as to the position to which Dr. George 

 Wilson attained as a man of science and of letters. But it is 

 scarcely necessary that anything should be said, for the sense of 

 his loss attests the value of his scientific labours, and his books 

 afford abundant evidence of the fine tone of his mind. His 

 " Chemistry of the Electric Telegraph," and " Chemistry of the 

 Stars" though scientific treatises in the best sense of the word? 

 are felt by those who read them to be something more than this > 

 they are the products of a highly poetical, as well as an accurate 

 and well-balanced mind. His fertile imagination, and lively 

 fancy, enabled him to impart not only lucidity, but attractiveness 



