LIFE AND WORK OF LORD KELVm THOMPSON. 767 



afflictions he had visibly aged, and the illness of Lady Kelvin found 

 him little able physically to sustain the anguish of the stroke. He 

 wandered distractedly about the corridors of his house, unable at 

 last to concentrate his mind on the work at hand. A chill seized him, 

 and after about a fortnight of prostration he sank slowly and quietly 

 away. 



He was buried in Westminster Abbey, with national honors, on 

 December 23, 1907. 



The sym{)athies of all of us go out to the gracious lady who sur- 

 vives him and who with such assiduous devotion tended him in his 

 declining years. 



Honors fell thickly on Lord Kelvin in his later life. He was 

 President of the Royal Society from 1890 to 1894. He had been 

 made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851 and in 1883 had been 

 awarded the Copley medal. He was raised to the peerage in 1892. 

 He was one of the original members of the Order of Merit, founded 

 in 1902 ; was a grand officer of the Legion of Honor ; and held the 

 Prussian order Pour le Merite ; in 1902 was named a privy councilor. 

 In 1904 he was elected chancellor of the university, in which he had 

 filled the chair of natural philosophy for fifty-three years. He had 

 celebrated his jubilee with unusual marks of world-wide esteem in 

 1896, and finally retired in 1899. He was a member of every foreign 

 academy, and held honorary degrees from almost every university. 

 In 1899 we elected him an honorary member of our institution. 



In politics he was, up to 1885, a broad Liberal ; but, as was natural 

 in an Ulsterman, became an ardent Unionist on the introduction of 

 the home-rule bill. He once told me that he preferred Chamber- 

 lain's plan of home rule with four Irish parliamentvS — one in each 

 province. 



In religion Lord Kelvin was an Anglican — at least from his Cam- 

 bridge days, but when at Largs attended the Presbyterian Free 

 Church. His simple, unobtrusive, but essential piety of soul was 

 unclouded. He had a deep detestation of ritualism and sacerdotal- 

 ism, which he hated heart and soul in all its forms; and he denounced 

 spiritualism as a loathsome and vile superstition. His profound 

 studies had led him again and again to contemplate a beginning to 

 the order of things, and he more than once publicly professed a pro- 

 found and entirely unaifected belief in Creative Design. 



Kindly hearted, lovable, modest to a degree almost unbelievable, 

 he carried through life the most intense love of truth and an insa- 

 tiable desire for the advancement of natural knowledge. Accurate 

 and minute measurement was for him as honorable a mode of advanc- 

 ing knowledge as the most brilliant or recondite speculation. At 

 both ends of the scale his preeminence in the quest for truth was un- 



