SKETCH OF SIR CHARLES WILLIAM SIEMENS. 553 



actual work of the farm, sawing wood and pumping water, but it was 

 made to supply in part the place of the sun itself, and assist the growth 

 of plants and fruits." 



The latest research having a practical bearing, with which Dr. Sie- 

 mens's name is associated, was that which had for its ultimate end econ- 

 omy of the fuel used in domestic consumption and the abolition of 

 smoke. With these purposes he was studying plans for extracting 

 the gas from coal, and burning the gas and the coke separately, with a 

 promise of successful realization which Sir William Thomson has well 

 indicated in relating an incident that happened on the day of Dr. Sie- 

 mens's death. On the 19th of November Sir William was accosted 

 in a manner of which most persons occupied with science have not 

 infrequent experience ; " Can you scientific people not save us from 

 these black and yellow city fogs ? " The instant answer was : " Sir Will- 

 iam Siemens is going to do it ; and I hope, if we live a few years longer, 

 we shall have seen almost the last of them." An apparatus which he 

 had devised for the application of his plan to steam-machinery was to 

 have been set in operation at the end of November. 



Another research in which Dr. Siemens was engaged, all theoreti- 

 cal, was into the manner in which the solar heat is kept up ; and he 

 sought to show that, as in his own regenerative furnaces, none of the 

 heat is lost, but that all is kept alive in some form, ultimately to be 

 returned to the sun and to renew its energies in perpetuity, 



One of Sir William Siemens's biographers well says of him that, in 

 whatever direction he turned, his thoughts seemed to perceive new 

 methods of working out old problems, or to discover new problems 

 which it immediately became his province to solve ; and it is said to 

 have been a common saying in his workshops, that as soon as any 

 particular problem had been given up by everybody as a bad job, it 

 had only to be taken to Dr. Siemens for him to suggest half a dozen 

 ways of solving it, two of which would be complicated and imprac- 

 ticable, two difficult, and two perfectly satisfactory. 



Sir William Siemens was not a voluminous writer, but thirty -five 

 papers are attributed to him in the Royal Society's catalogue of scien- 

 tific papers, published in 1873. He has done much since, which is 

 probably represented by literary results. His last public lecture was 

 delivered March 13, 1883, and was on " The Electrical Transmission and 

 Storage of Power." He was fully supplied with honors and titles, sci- 

 entific and civil, and was a member of numerous learned societies. 



Sir William Thomson says that " in private life. Sir William Sie- 

 mens, with his lively, bright intelligence, always present, and eager to 

 give pleasure and benefit to those around him, was a most lovable 

 man, singularly unselfish, and full of kind thought and care for others." 



Dr. Siemens died on the 19th of November last, of ossification of 

 the heart, in connection with the results of a fall which he had suffered 

 on the 5th. His funeral was held in Westminster Abbey. 



