4i6 



NA TURE 



[March 3, 1898 



century man should surely be an inducement to action 

 rather than a deterrent. The value of simultaneous 

 expeditions working in friendly rivalry is in such a case 

 far greater than that of consecutive or isolated work. 



Hugh Robert Mill. 



ERNST CHRISTIAN JULIUS SC HE RING. 



ON November 2, 1897, as already announced in 

 Nature, Gottingen lost, at the age of sixty-four, 

 its senior mathematical professor, Ernst Christian Julius 

 Schering, best known as the editor of Gauss's works. 



Prof. Schering's life presents one curious feature, rare 

 in the German academic world. Gottingen was the only 

 University with which as student, teacher, or professor he 

 had any connection. The forty-five years of his life 

 there go back to the days when Gauss, Wilhelm Weber 

 and Dirichlet still lived and taught. Although the first 

 of these was to exercise paramount mastery over 

 Schering's future, we can trace the influence of each in 

 his life and writings. Schering's published work deals 

 entirely with subjects in which his celebrated teachers 

 were pioneers — theory of numbers, non-Euclidian geo- 

 metry, hydrodynamics, electricity and magnetism. As 

 far as one can judge, Schering's personal predilections 

 were for a strictly analytical treatment of pure mathe- 

 matics ; the force of circumstances, however, directed 

 part of his energies to applied mathematics and prac- 

 tical physics. He is said to have shown great mathe- 

 matical promise at school at Lueneborg and at the 

 Polytechnikum at Hanover ; so much so that he aban- 

 doned his intention of becoming an architect, and went 

 up to the University in 1852. His studies were crowned 

 with success, and he received prizes both for his Doctor's 

 dissertation, "On the mathematical theory of electric 

 currents," and for his Habilitationsschrift, " On the con- 

 formal representation of the ellipsoid on the plane." 



In i860 he became Professor, and was at first engaged 

 in astronomical calculations under Prof. Klinkerfues. 

 In 1863 he embarked on his life-work, the editing of 

 Gauss's papers. Gauss left, besides a large quantity of 

 published work, a mass of notes and of half-finished 

 productions. The work of collecting the pubHshed 

 papers, and of looking through, arranging and collecting 

 the unpublished, fell to Schering. From 1863 to 1874 

 he edited six volumes of collected works, published by 

 the Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft, of Gottingen. He 

 subsequently edited the Theoria Motus for the owner 

 of the copyright ; this volume, though apparently uniform 

 with the others, does not properly belong to the set, and, 

 the copyright having now expired, the Gesellschaft pro- 

 pose to publish the Theoria Motus., together with some 

 still unpublished writings, in a seventh volume of their 

 edition. 



It is difficult for any one who has not seen the docu- 

 ments to estimate the labour required to bring them 

 into a form fit for publication. There still remains an 

 enormous mass of unpublished matter, notes on scraps 

 of paper and backs of envelopes, calculations without 

 explanations, statements without proofs, and so on. 

 Until a lingering illness rendered him unfit for much 

 exertion, Schering went on working to bring order into 

 this chaos ; but he was unwilling to publish except in a 

 perfected form. Since 1874 no volume had appeared, 

 and, except Prof. Schur, no one had access to any of the 

 original manuscripts. 



There was consequently great curiosity about the 

 MSS. when, on Prof. Schering's death, they were brought 

 out and examined. A number of mathematicians have 

 been enlisted by Prof. Klein, and it is hoped that at 

 least the notes on planetary disturbances and the corre- 

 spondence on non-Euclidian geometry will soon be 

 published. Work that is too imperfect for publication 



NO. 1479, VOL. 57] 



will in future be always accessible at the University 

 library. 



Apart from those already mentioned, .Schering pub- 

 lished numerous papers, mostly to be found between 1870 

 and 1887, in the Gottingen Nachrichien and Anzeiger 

 and the Comptes rendus. His lectures, which for some 

 years he had done little more than announce, were 

 usually on higher pure mathematics. 



In 1868 he became director of the Gauss Magnetic 

 Observatory. His work consisted partly in directing the 

 studies of students in magnetism and kindred subjects, 

 partly in conducting observations, &c. Generally he 

 continued and extended the work as Gauss had planned 

 it. Accounts of his observations, and of various improve- 

 ments made by him in the instruments, will be found in 

 papers by himself and his brother. Prof. Karl Schering, 

 of Darmstadt. W. H. and G. Chisholm Young. 



NOTES. 



On Saturday last, at the Trocadero Restaurant, a dinner was 

 given to Prof. T. McKenny Hughes by his old students, on the 

 occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his election to the 

 Woodwardian Professorship of Geology at Cambridge. Sir 

 Archibald Geikie presided, and covers were laid for old students 

 and friends to the number of sixty five. An illuminated address 

 was presented to Prof. Hughes by Dr. R. D. Roberts and Mr 

 A. Strahan as the oldest and earliest of his Cambridge students 

 in the company ; and the healths of Prof, and Mrs. Hughes were 

 proposed by Sir A. Geikie. In the course of his speech, Sir A. 

 Geikie alluded to the great and continued growth and success of 

 the Cambridge Geological School, which he characterised as 

 second to none in the world. Prof. Hughes replied, and sub- 

 sequently the President of the Geological Society (Mr. Whitaker), 

 Sir Henry Ho worth, M.P., Prof James Stuart, M.P., and Dr. 

 Hicksspoke and testified to the value of Prof. Hughes's professional 

 work, and to the wide extent of his personal influence. In ad- 

 dition to those above mentioned, there were present Prof. Wilt- 

 shire, Mr. W. Hudleston, Prof. Etheridge, Dr. Henry Wood- 

 ward, Prof. Lapworth, Prof. Watts, Prof. Ainsworth Davis, 

 Messrs. Teall, Herries, Bauerman, Marr, Harker, Seward, 

 Woods, Reed, Rudler, Kynaston, Mond, and several ladies, 

 many of whom had studied under Prof. Hughes at Cam- 

 bridge. Letters and telegrams of congratulation from leading 

 Continental geologists were read by Sir A. Geikie. A mag- 

 nificent silver loving-cup was presented to Prof. McKenny 

 Hughes on Monday, February 28, by his past and present 

 students at Cambridge as a permanent memento of his twenty- 

 five years' work as Woodwardian Professor of Geology, and 

 as a mark of their esteem and gratitude. The cup bore a 

 suitable inscription in Latin, and the arms of the University and 

 of Trinity and Clare Colleges ; and an illuminated list of the 

 subscribers was presented with it. Mr. Cowper Reed, Miss 

 Blanche Smith, Dr. Roberts, Prof. Ainsworth Davis, and Rev. 

 W. L. Carter made appropriate speeches, and Prof. Hughes 

 replied. 



The Physico-Mathematical Society of Kazan has made its 

 first award of the Lobachevski Prize to Prof. Sophus Lie, of 

 the University of Leipzig, in consideration of the third volume 

 of his work, " Theorie der Transformationsgruppen." The 

 prize, which is of the value of 500 roubles, is to be adjudged 

 every three years for work in geometry, preferably non- Euclidean 

 geometry, and all works published in Russian, English, French, 

 German, Italian, or Latin in the six years preceding the award 

 are eligible. In Prof. Lie's treatise the theory of non-Euclidean 

 geometry has been exhaustively re-stated and re-established in 

 a profound investigation on the space-problem, based on the 

 work of the late von Helmholtz. 



