156 Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



that they will nevertheless produce a very considerable impression. 

 For so many of his contributions to science were made to the Royal 

 Dublin Society (of which he acted as Secretary from 1881 to 1889) 

 or orally to the British Association, neither of which agencies are 

 specially well adapted for informing the world generally, that to 

 many the memoirs which will shortly be published, under the careful 

 editorship of Dr. Larmor, will be new, and will come as a revelation 

 of solid and industrious work. 



Nevertheless, once more it must be said that his wide knowledge, 

 and brilliant speculations based upon that knowledge, were what 

 impressed his friends the most. Sometimes they seemed almost too 

 fanciful, too far-reaching ahead of solid fact, too intangible and 

 fantastic to be attractive; that is the case to some extent, for 

 instance, with parts of the Helmholtz Lecture, where the beauty and 

 the possibilities of the vortex hypothesis of the constitution of 

 matter and of the structure of the ether entice him into regions 

 where substantial mathemathical progress is hardly yet possible. 

 Into this region, however, the human race must advance, if it is to- 

 proceed with the unification of matter and the more fundamental 

 understanding of the material universe ; and our descendants the 

 possessors of an elaborated theory will be able to judge better 

 than we can how far these speculations of FitzGerald were fantastic 

 imagination, and how far they were the outcome of a real and semi- 

 inspired insight into the inmost processes of Nature. 



But in spite of his ready absorption in these physical topics and his 

 almost unique power of quickly grasping and fruitfully dealing with 

 them, he was imbued with a sense of the far greater importance of 

 humanity itself than of any of these material things. In fact it 

 was this constant feeling of the value of human relationships, and 

 the supreme influence of good feeling and affection, that led him to 

 regard all questions of priority or of scientific credit with not so 

 much disdain as absence of interest. It is easy to say that provided 

 a discovery is made it matters little who makes it, but it is not so 

 easy constantly and consistently to feel and act in that spirit; but 

 so far as it can be done FitzGerald did it, and did it apparently almost 

 without an effort. The things he really valued were the things 

 belonging to the human spirit the development of the individual 

 and the development of the race. Any thing which hindered this 

 met with his strenuous opposition : self-satisfied unprogressiveness in 

 educational matters excited his wrathful and outspoken indignation :: 

 and on these subjects alone did he occasionally make enemies. Other 

 things might be of intense interest but were not of supreme value 

 and to sacrifice any personal relationship to them was worse than 

 useless. 



