256 Annual Report of the Council. 



31st, 1889, was one less than at the corresponding date last 

 year. Eight new members had been elected, eight had 

 resigned, and one, Mr. Richard Peacock, M.P., M.I.C.E., had 

 died. The Society has also lost by death one honorary 

 member. Professor Rudolf Clausius. 



Richard Peacock was one of that numerous class of 

 " self-made " engineers who have been connected with the 

 Society. He was the seventh child of a working lead 

 miner, and was born in Swaledale, in the North Riding, 

 in 1820. His father, Ralph Peacock, appears to have been 

 a man of much natural ability and especially ingenious 

 in mechanical construction, who worked his way, we are 

 told, to the position of foreman or superintendent of 

 several mines in the dale in which the subject of this notice 

 was born. Richard inherited his father's taste for mechanics, 

 and his future career seems to have been practically de- 

 termined by the bent given to his mind in consequence of 

 being taken by his father, at the age of five, to see George 

 Stephenson's " No. i " locomotive running on the Stockton 

 and Darlington Railway, opened on September 27th, 1825. 

 In 1830, the elder Peacock removed to Leeds to fill the 

 position of assistant superintendent in the construction of 

 the Leeds tunnel on the Leeds and Selby Railway, on 

 which line he continued to be employed for the remainder 

 of his working life. Richard's education was obtained at a 

 Sunday School and partly at the Leeds Grammar School, 

 and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to Messrs. 

 Fenton, Murray and Jackson, a firm employed in the con- 

 struction of locomotives for the Leeds, and the Liverpool and 

 Manchester Railways. His progress in mechanical know- 

 ledge is indicated by the fact that at the age of eighteen he 

 was offered the position of locomotive superintendent on the 

 railway on which his father was employed. Like young 

 Nasmyth, ten years earlier, however, he was inspired with 

 a desire to proceed to London, and, again like Nasmyth, he 



