184 Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



of the value of such knowledge, he speedily devised experiments which 

 ultimately led to important results. Wilson himself, in a lecture to 

 the Society of Arts, says : " Science once introduced has raised 

 candle-making from a simple, clumsy, offensive, mechanical trade into 

 a first-class chemical manufacture, one offering the widest field for 

 applications of the highest chemistry. The time must soon, if it has 

 not already, come, when a well-organised laboratory, and a thorough 

 acquaintance with the works of the high scientific chemists, and even 

 communication with some of themselves, will be considered necessary 

 elements of candle-making success." This was written so long ago as 

 1856, when its cogency would not be so fully realised as it is now. 



On his retirement from the management of this great concern, 

 Wilson gave himself up enthusiastically to gardening as a hobby, 

 being one of the first to adopt orchard-house culture on a considerable 

 scale, and afterwards devoting himself to the culture of lilies and 

 hardy plants generally. His garden was not a garden in the ordinary 

 sense ; it was a wood, a lake, a prairie, a rocky valley, where the 

 plants did not appear to grow because they had been placed there, 

 but because there they found the conditions most favourable for their 

 growth. The art of the gardener was concealed, but none the less it 

 was art based on accurate observation and continuous experiment, 

 qualities gained in the laboratory, as he himself stated. 



M. T. M. 



ALFKED MARIE CORNU. 18411902. 



Professor Alfred Marie Cornu, who died on the 12th April, 1902, 

 was born in 1841 at Chateauneuf , and entered the Ecole Poly technique 

 at the age of 19 years. Leaving it in 1864, he passed to the Eeole des 

 Mines, the diploma of which he received in 1866. But he did not 

 remain long in the profession of engineering, being appointed in 1871 

 Professor of Physics in the Ecole Polytechnique, an office which he 

 held down to the day of his death. His brilliant career as a student 

 was followed by one more brilliant as a teacher and investigator. Of 

 his many contributions to original knowledge only a very brief outline 

 can be given. His position at the Ecole Polytechnique gave him, 

 amidst the material surroundings of his laboratory, the leisure from 

 routine so necessary for research and for the never-ending improvement 

 of his courses of lectures to maintain them abreast of the advances of 

 science. The beauty, the dignified ease and perfection, of his investi- 

 gations, the perspicacity of his observations, the masterly reserve, so 



