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FRANCIS CRANMER PENROSE. 18171903. 



Francis Cranmer Penrose died at Colebyfield, Wimbledon, orr 

 February 15, 1903. He was bom on October 29, 1817, at Brace- 

 bridge, near Lincoln, of which parish his father was Vicar, his mother 

 being a daughter of Dr. Edmund Cartwright, F.R.S. (the inventor of 

 the power loom and wool-combing machine), and authoress of the well- 

 known series of histories published under the assumed name of 

 " Mrs. Markham." 



Sent to the Grammar School at Bedford in 1825, he formed what 

 proved a lasting friendship with a schoolfellow, the future Sir Waring- 

 ton Smyth, and in 1829 he was removed to the foundation of 

 Winchester, where he remained until 1835, when, having shown 

 considerable aptitude for architectural drawing, he was apprenticed 

 to the well-known Mr. Edward Blore, under whose guidance he seems 

 to have been thoroughly well grounded in all that pertains to the 

 profession he eventually followed, while still keeping up and extending 

 his taste, already developed, for classical as well as mathematical 

 studies. 



In October, 1839, his apprenticeship being over, he went to Cam- 

 bridge, entering at Magdalene College, where he at once formed a 

 friendship with Charles Kingsley, then an undergraduate at the same 

 College, and with the scarcely less distinguished Charles Blachford 

 Mansfield, then of Clare, and through them with Frederick Denison 

 Maurice, while he fortunately fell under the influence of George 

 Peacock, at that time Lowndean Professor of Astronomy, and also 

 made acquaintance, subsequently to develop into close friendship, with 

 John Couch Adams, whose grand discovery of the planet Neptune had 

 yet to be recognized. 



In this way Penrose's attention was directed to astronomical sub- 

 jects, in the study of which he became so proficient ; but he was a man 

 of very wide interests, and devoted himself to boating as a recreation. 

 He was not only Captain of his College boat, which he raised from a 

 low place to nearly the top of the river, but he also pulled an oar in 

 that of the University in the three successive races of 1840, 1841 and 

 1842, against Oxford; and he was, besides, the inventor of the 

 ingenious method of showing at a glance the varying places of the 

 different boats, which as " boat charts " has become so universally used. 

 He also exercised his physical powers in other ways, as by more than- 

 once walking in one day the whole distance between Cambridge and 

 London, skating from Ely to the Wash, and so on. 



