246 Obituary Notice* of Fellows deceased. 



SIR JOHN COXROY. 18451900. 



Sir John Conroy was the only son of Sir Edward Conroy, and 

 grandson of another Sir John, from whom he may have received the 

 inheritance of an old-fashioned courtliness. His mother was a sister 

 of the late Lord Rosse. He was born in 1845, and spent his boyhood 

 at Arborfield Grange, near Reading, and at Eton. From Eton he 

 went to Christ Church, and became a pupil of the present writer, first 

 in the laboratory of the University, and then in that of the College, 

 which was at that time created by the Dean and Chapter out of the old 

 School of Anatomy, where Kidd, and Acland, and Rolleston had worked 

 and taught. While keenly interested in scientific knowledge, he was 

 from the first a man of wide sympathies and many friends. His chief 

 intellectual interests through life were scientific ; but the social, 

 moral, and religious sides of his nature were as fully developed as the 

 intellectual, and as often determined his choice of friends and the 

 bestowal of his time. 



Characteristically, the one kind of sport which he enjoyed was the 

 old English sport of fox-hunting, and to this he clung from his boy- 

 hood till his strength began to fail. During his mother's lifetime 

 he lived mainly with her, arranging at one time to come to Oxford for 

 two days in the week, and carrying on scientific work partly in Oxford 

 and partly at home. On his mother's death, in 1880, he was offered a 

 lectureship at Keble College by his old friend and Christ Church 

 contemporary, Edward Talbot (then Warden of Keble, now Bishop of 

 Rochester). A few years later he became a tutor of Keble, having in 

 the meantime built a small laboratory within the College, which remains 

 as his gift. 



With regard to his earlier life, I may quote the words of an 

 undergraduate contemporary, who knew him fron that time to the 

 end of his days : 



" He was not a man who changed much ; always the same simple, 

 genial, and entirely modest fellow, a perfect gentleman and a true, 

 loyal friend. He never thrust himself or his favourite occupations 

 {which were already scientific) upon his friends, and I think we were 

 a little surprised to find how able a man in his own department we 

 had amongst us in undergraduate life." 



Conroy held the same high place in the affection of his colleagues 

 both at Keble College, where he was Lecturer for seven years, and at 

 Balliol, where he succeeded Mr. Harold Dixon as Bedford Lecturer in 



