no 



NATURE 



[December 5, 1895 



adjacent parts of the rings would have different angular velocities. 

 It was found, also, that the external boundary of the outer ring 

 apparently joined the inner bright ring at a point on its northern 

 edge, while the crape ring was almost twice as wide in the 

 northern as in the southern part. This imperfect symmetry of 

 the outer ring and crape ring with the inner bright ring, suggests 

 that they do not all rotate in one plane. The different divisions 

 of the ring would thus cast shadows upon each other, the 

 amount of shadow depending upon the inclination. 



The colour of the crape ring is described as bluish, and the 

 shadow of the globe on the rings was curved, with the convexity 

 towards the planet. Encke's division was very feeble and un- 

 certain during the observations. It is pointed out that future 

 observations of the spots may throw further light upon the 

 rotation and constitution of the rings. 



THE ANNIVERSARY MEETING OF THE 

 ROYAL SOCIETY. 



T AST Saturday being St. Andrew's Day, the Anniversary 

 ^-^ Meeting of the Royal Society was held in their apartments 

 at Burlington House. The auditors of the Treasurer's accounts 

 having read their report, the Secretary read the list of Fellows 

 elected and deceased since the last Anniversary. 



The qualifications of the new Fellows were given in Nature 

 of INIay 9 (vol. 52, p. 31). Since the last Anniversary Meeting, 

 the Society has lost nineteen Fellows and seven Foreign 

 Members, viz. : — 



Bisset Hawkins, December 7, 1894, aged 98. 



Pafnutij Tchebitchef, December 8, 1894, aged 73. 



Arthur Cayley, January 26, 1895, aged 73. 



Sir James Cockle, January 27, 1895, aged 76. 



Rev. Thomas Penyngton Kirkman, February, 1895, aged 88. 



Tohn Whitaker Hulke, February 19, 1895, aged 64. 



Henry Austin Bruce, Lord Aberdare, February 25, 1895, ^^ged 



80. 

 Sir William Scovell Savory, March 4, 1895, ^Z^^ 69. 

 Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, March 5, 1895, aged 84. 

 Albert William Beetham, March f i, 1895, aged 95. 

 James Dwight Dana, April 15, 1895, aged 82. 

 Carl Ludwig, April 24, 1895, aged 78. 

 Roundell Palmer, Earl of Selborne, May 4, 1895, aged 83. 

 Henry John Carter, May 4, 1895, aged 82. 

 Sir George Buchanan, May 5, 1895, aged 64. 

 Franz Ernst Neumann, May 23, 1895, aged 97. 

 Valentine Ball, June 15, 1895, aged 52. 

 William Crawford Williamson, June 23, 1895, aged 78. 

 Right Hon. Thomas Henry Huxley, June 29, 1895, aged 70. 

 Henri Ernest Baillon, July 19, 1895, aged 67. 

 Charles Cardale Babington, July 22, 1895, aged 86. 

 Sir John Tomes, July 29, 1895, aged 80. 

 John Syer Bristowe, August 20, 1895, aged 68. 

 Sven Ludwig Loven, September 3, 1895, aged 86. 

 Louis Pasteur, September 28, 1895, aged 73. 

 George Edward Dobson, November 26, 1895, aged 47. 



Lord Kelvin, the President, then delivered the Anniversary 

 Address as follows : — 



In Cayley we have lost one of the makers of mathematics, a 

 poet in the true sense of the word, who made real for the world 

 the ideas which his ever fertile imagination created for himself. 

 He was the Senior Wrangler of my freshman's year at Cam- 

 bridge, and I well remember to this day the admiration and awe 

 with which, before the end of my first term just fifty-four years 

 ago, I had learned to regard his mathematical powers. When 

 a little later I attained to the honour of knowing him personally, 

 the awe was evaporated by the sunshine of his genial kindness ; 

 the admiration has remained unabated to this day, and his friend- 

 ship has been one of the valued possessions of my life. While 

 we mourn his departure from among us we know with gratitude 

 that he has left an imperishable monument of his life's work in 

 the grand edition of his mathematical writings which the 

 University Press of Cambridge gives to the world. The 

 interesting and genuinely appreciative obituary notice of Arthur 

 Cayley, contributed by our colleague. Prof. Forsyth, to the Pro- 

 ceedings of the Royal Society for the present year, has been re- 

 printed as a preface to the eighth volume of his "Collected 



NO. 1362, VOL. 55] 



Mathematical Papers," which was published last August, rather 

 more than half of it having been passed through the press by the 

 author with notes and references, and the remainder simply 

 reprinted from the original publications. Matter for two more 

 such volumes remains to be reprinted. 



At the good old age of ninety-seven the veteran Franz Ernst 

 Neumann has left us. He has been one oT the most profound 

 and fertile of all the workers in mathematical physics of the nine- 

 teenth century. I remember with gratitude the admirable and 

 suggestive theorem •• on electromagnetic induction which I 

 learned in 1848, from a first paper on the sul)ject which he had 

 communicated to the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and which, 

 translated into French, was published in the April number of 

 that year of Liouville's Jottrnal des Mat/u'/natujiies. That first 

 paper and others which followed it on the same subject, and his 

 papers on the physical theory of light and on elasticity, are grand 

 and permanently valuable contributions to science. 



The death of Huxley, one of my predecessors in the 

 Presidential chair of the Royal Society, takes from us a 

 man who can ill be spared. During the fifty years since 

 he sailed from England, as assistant-surgeon on board 

 H.M.S. Rattlesnake, bound for a surveying expedition in 

 the southern seas, he had been a resolute and untiring 

 searcher after truth, and an enthusiastically devoted teacher 

 of what he learned from others and what he discovered by 

 his own work in biological science. His first contribution to 

 science was a short note communicated, while he was still a 

 student in the Charing Cross Hospital, to the Medical Times 

 and Gazette, describing a structure in the root-sheath of hair, 

 which has since borne the name of Huxley's layer. It was 

 followed by papers on the blood corpuscles of the Ainphtoxtcs 

 lanceolatus and on the anatomy and affinities of the family of 

 Medtisa, for the British Association and the ^<oyal Society ; and 

 several other articles on various biological subjects, all describing 

 some of the work of the leisure left him by his medical duties 

 during his four years' cruise on board the Rattlesnake, which 

 were sent home by him to England, and published during his 

 absence. It is to be hoped that the long series, thus so well 

 begun, of papers describing skilful and laborious research by 

 which knowledge was increased in every department of biology, 

 will be given to the world in collected form as soon as possible. 

 Even those purely scientific papers contain ample evidence that 

 Huxley's mind did not rest with the mere recording of results 

 discovered by observation and experiment : iu them, and in the 

 nine volumes of collected essays which he has left us, we find 

 everywhere traces of acute and profound philosophic thought. 

 When he introduced the word agnostic to describe his own feel- 

 ing with reference to the origin and continuance of life, he con- 

 fessed himself to be in the presence of mysteries on which 

 science had not been strong enough to enlighten us ; and he 

 chose the word wisely and well. It is a word which, even 

 though negative in character, may be helpful to all philosophers 

 and theologians. If religion means strenuousness in doing right 

 and trying to do right, who has earned the title of a religious 

 man better than Huxley ? 



Another name literally of world-wide fame, Louis Pasteur, 

 stands next to the end of our list of losses. Before he entered 

 on his grand biological work, Pasteur made a discovery of first- 

 rate importance in physics and chemistry — the formation of 

 crystals, visibly right-handed and left-handed, from a solution of 

 racemate of soda and ammonia ; and the extraction of ordinary 

 tartaric acid and of a kind of tartaric acid not previously known, 

 from solutions obtained by picking out the crystals separately 

 and redissolving : the new kind of tartaric acid having the pro- 

 perty of producing the opposite rotatory effect on the plane of 

 polarisation of light to that produced by ordinary tartaric acid 

 From 1848 to 1857 he was chiefly occupied with researches 

 related to the subject of that great discovery, as may be seen 

 from the titles of the first twenty-two of his papers in the Royal 

 Society Catalogue. His work of those nine years led up from 

 Biot's fundamental discovery of the dioptric heli(;oidal property 

 of liquids and vapours, to the enrichment of chemistry by the 

 annexation of a new province called stereochemistry, splendidly 

 and fruitfully developed twenty years later by Le Bel and Van 't 

 Hoff. Near the end of 1857 his twenty-third paper appeared, 

 three pages, in the Coniptes rendus, ' ' Sur la Fermentation 

 appelee lactique." It shows that he had then entered on the 



i Quoted in " Mathematical and Thysical Papers " . (Sir William 

 Tnomson), p. 92, vol. i. 



