February 2, 1922] 



NATURE 



145 



him to repay the advances which had been made to 

 him. Once out of debt, he found the call of the 

 ice irresistible. He meditated a dash to the 

 unknown centre of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic 

 regions, and had gone far to mature his plans when 

 circumstances barred the way, and he resolved on 

 one more Antarctic voyage. 



This time the munificence of friends secured him 

 freedom from financial worries. His plan was 

 sound : the Enderby Quadrant which he was to 

 explore was practically unknown ; his old comrades 

 rallied to him from the ends of the earth; but the 

 ship was small though stout, and he was forty- 

 seven years old, though a boy at heart. He sailed 

 in the Quest in September, 1921, had a grievous 

 buffeting on the voyage to Madeira, a long and 

 trying delay^ for refitting in the heat of Rio de 

 Janeiro, again a stormy voyage to South Georgia, 

 and then the sudden seizure in the midst of apparent 

 health, and the career of the most Elizabethan of 

 modern explorers had an end as abrupt as the clash 

 of " the blind Fury with the abhorred shears." 



Shackleton lived like a mighty rushing "wind, and 

 the very strength of his nature made him enemies 

 as well as friends. He resented injustice and 

 slights, but they only spurred him on to show by 

 new achievements how baseless they were. He 

 endeared himself to his friends, and was adored by 

 his ship-mates, who saw in " the Boss " a kindlv 

 but unquestionable authority. He loved applause 

 and gloried in the limelight ; but he was applauded 

 for feats that no one else was able to accomplish. 

 The labourer is worthy of his hire, and no one has a 

 right to quarrel with a good workman if he likes to 

 take some of his pay in the form of praise and 

 publicity. 



Shackleton's most characteristic qualitv was 

 neither courage nor resolution, both of which he 

 shared with other heroes of exploration. It was his 

 instinctive judgment. Whenever he had to make a 

 •Icpision between two courses of action, no matter 

 how suddenly the necessity arose nor how quickly 

 it had to be met, he invariably did the right thing. 

 Again and again the wrong 'decision would have 

 meant certain death or irremediable disaster. This 

 power of decision was not an effort of reason, but 

 an apparently instinctive impulse which can perhaps 

 be accounted for by a peculiar balance of percep- 

 tion. ^ Indeed, it is to the balancing of contradictory 

 qualities that much of Shackleton's success was due. 

 His mind was not essentially scientific, though he 

 valued science and made most generous provision for 

 it ill his expeditions. He was both impulsive and 

 cautious, yet he was never irresolute. He revelled in 

 poetry and seemed to breathe the air of romance, 

 but at the same time he was a methodical organiser 

 and a keen business man. His imagination was 

 amazingly fertile, and it seems as if in planning an 

 expedition he imaged to himself everything that 

 could possibly happen in any set of circumstances 

 and then set himself to work to provide for each 

 contingency. Whatever may have been its secret, 

 his personality was his greatest power, and it marked 

 him out as a commanding figure. He might well 

 NO. 2727, VOL. 109] 



have been a Drake or a Ralegh ; in no time and in 

 no conditions could he have been commonplace. The 

 greatness of his loss may be judged by the things 

 he did and the way he did them. 



Hugh Robert Mill. 



Sir William Christie, K.C.B., F.R.S. 

 William Henry Mahoney Christie was the 

 youngest son of Samuel Hunter Christie, pro- 

 fessor of mathematics in the Royal Military 

 Academy at Woolwich and secretary of the Royal 

 Society from 1837 to 1854. He was born in 1845, 

 the same year as George Darwin and two years later 

 than David Gill. Educated at King's College School 

 and Trinity College, Cambridge, he was fourth 

 wrangler in 1868, and in the following year was 

 elected to a fellowship of his college. On the recom- 

 mendation of Airy, Christie was, in the autumn of 

 1870, appointed chief assistant at the Royal Obser- 

 vatory, Greenwich. At that time the activity of 

 the Observatory was largely concentrated on its tra- 

 ditional duty of the regular observation of sun, 

 moon, planets, and fundamental stars, the stars 

 being regarded as points of reference for the planets, 

 and especially the moon, and serving also for 

 the determination of time. The observations were 

 made with the transit circle erected by Airy in 1850. 

 Christie made a careful study of (i) the most suit- 

 able value of the refraction constant at Greenwich, 

 (2) the corrections to be applied for a well-estab- 

 lished and persistent difference between the zenith 

 distances of stars when observed by reflection from 

 mercury and when observed directly, and (3) the 

 value of the latitude at Greenwich — data required to 

 deduce the declinations of stars free from systematic 

 errors. In this involved and somewhat indeter- 

 minate problem his judgment was correct, as is 

 shown by the smallness of the systematic corrections 

 applicable to the Greenwich catalogues of 1880, 

 1890, and 1900 to bring them into accord with the 

 mean of other observatories. 



The extension of the field of work of the Observa- 

 tory was pressed on Airy by Warren de la Rue, who 

 advocated continuous observations of sun spots, and 

 by Huggins, who advocated spectroscopic observa- 

 tions of sun and stars. In a letter to Airy in May, 

 1872, Huggins writes : " I understand Mr. Christie, 

 who is zealous in the matter, to say that you would 

 be agreeable to this course." Government sanction 

 was obtained, and Mr. E. W. Maunder was ap- 

 pointed assistant for photographic and spectroscopic 

 ob.servations. Christie was in sympathy with both 

 these extensions of the activity of the Observatory. 

 The photo-heliographic work was carried through 

 very successfully, and arrangements made with the 

 Solar Physics Committee, and later with the Cape 

 and Kodaikanal Observatories, resulted in a uniform 

 and continuous series of photographs of the sua 

 being taken day by day, which were afterwards 

 measured and discussed at Greenwich with reference- 

 to the positions and areas of sun spots. 



The spectroscopic observations for velocity in the 

 line of sight were not successful. It was not until 

 the introduction of photography by Vogel that any 

 reliance could be placed on line of sight determina- 



