5 8 Annals of the Philosophical Club 



forms of carbon led him to ascertain the atomic weight of graphite, 

 and to regard it as an independent mineral, while suggesting at the 

 same time a process for purifying it of economic value. He was 

 elected F.R.S. in 1849 and Professor of Chemistry at Oxford in 

 1865, was made an Hon. D.C.L. in 1872, and died in 1880. 



SIR GEORGE EVEREST, whose name is inseparable from the survey 

 of India, was born July 4th, 1790, at Gwernvale, Brecknock. After 

 passing through Woolwich he obtained a commission in the Bengal 

 Artillery in 1806, and was selected, after seven years' service in 

 India, to make a survey of Java. This occupied him for two years, 

 and he was employed after his return on engineering work until he 

 was appointed chief assistant to the great trigonometrical survey 

 of India. The state of his health made necessary a visit to England 

 in 1825, and while there he was elected F.R.S. (in 1827). After 

 returning to India he measured an arc of the meridian 21 long. 

 In December, 1843, he retired with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, to 

 publish, four years afterwards, his great work an account of that 

 measurement. In 1861 he was made C.B. and knighted shortly 

 afterwards. He died in London on Dec. ist, 1866. 



PROFESSOR JAMES CLERK MAXWELL was the son of a Scotch 

 laird, born in Edinburgh on November I3th, 1831. He showed 

 early signs of exceptional power in mathematics, and went from 

 its University to Cambridge, where he graduated from Trinity 

 College as second wrangler and bracketed for the Smith Prize in 

 1854. He was made F.R.S. in 1861, and received the Rumford Medal 

 in 1860. After holding Professorships at Aberdeen and in King's 

 College, London, he devoted himself from 1865 to 1871 to mathe- 

 matical and physical work till in the latter year he was elected to 

 the newly founded Chair of Experimental Physics at Cambridge. 

 Here he laboured, lecturing, organizing the laboratory built by the 

 Duke of Devonshire, and adding to his scientific writings on such 

 subjects as the theory of compound colours (that all these are made 

 by a due mixture of three primary colours), the stability of motion 

 in Saturn's rings, the kinetic theory of gases, Faraday's lines of 

 force, and the nature of electricity and magnetism. His health 

 failed rather rapidly in the summer of 1879, and he died in Cambridge 

 on November 5th, regretted as a brilliant and sympathetic teacher, 

 a delightful companion, blending grave with gay, and a man with 

 wide interests and a deep sense of religion. 



ARCHIBALD SMITH, successful at the Bar and as a mathematician, 

 was son of a Glasgow merchant born at Greenhead, near that city, 

 on Aug. loth, 1813. From its University he went to Trinity College, 

 Cambridge, where he was senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman 

 in 1836. After election to a Fellowship at his College, he went to 

 the Bar, and obtained an excellent practice in questions connected 



