io6 



NA TURE 



[December 4, 1902 



to punch the head of him who has presumed to impose 

 his own name on his partner. 



How loyal he was to the school, how affectionately he 

 guarded its interests and how he studied to enhance its 

 usefulness, I, who was his colleague on the council of the 

 Royal College of Science for upwards of nine years, 

 desire now to bear testimony. It was the wish of his 

 heart, had he been spared, that, after his retirement from 

 the Mint, he might spend his remaining years, or so 

 many of them as the regulations of the Department would 

 have allowed him to spend, in its service. It was possible 

 that he cherished the hope that the erection of the new 

 buildings on the other side of Exhibition Road might 

 have afforded him the opportunity he had long desired, 

 that of creating and equipping a metallurgical laboratory 

 which should be worthy of this country and of an Empire 

 whose sons are engaged in metallurgical work in almost 

 every part of the globe. But if this was not to be, he has 

 at least erected a monument to himself in the record of 

 his past achievement ; in the thoroughness and fulness 

 of his teaching ; in the scientific enthusiasm with which 

 he sought to lay bare and illumine the problems of physical 

 metallurgy. During the two-and-twenty years he held 

 his chair, he trained a succession of men holding im- 

 portant positions at home and in many parts of the world, 

 who are grateful to him for the stimulating influence of his 

 teaching, who will recall many acts of personal kindness 

 and good will, and who, now that his place in the sub- 

 terranean lecture-room he loved so well and in which, 

 with all the quickening zeal of a born teacher, he had 

 spent some of the happiest hours of his life, knows him 

 no more, will mourn his loss as that of a dear friend, and 

 will continue to cherish his memory and recall the many 

 kindly traits of head and heart which characterised him. 



In the outset of his career as an investigator, Roberts- 

 Austen occupied himself with a number of minor 

 problems in inorganic chemistry, and there is little 

 continuity of thought or effort to be traced in much 

 of his 'prentice work, But there is invariably the note of 

 originality. All his life through, he was strongly attracted 

 by what is odd, uncommon or bizarre. Perhaps it was 

 the Celtic blood which ran in his veins which predisposed 

 him to the mysticism which was undoubtedly a feature of 

 his character. Had he lived three hundred years ago, 

 he would have been a typical alchemist and have spent 

 the skill and energy he showed in assaying and 

 minting gold in vain attempts to make it. Science, how- 

 ever, would certainly have been the richer for his efforts, 

 for he was a very acute observer, and although occasion- 

 ally his preconceptions were liable to run away with 

 him for a time, especially in the direction of scientific 

 heterodoxy, he was staunchly loyal to his facts. Much 

 of his work was influenced by his strong artistic sense 

 and by his passionate regard for beauty of form 

 or colour. The secrets of oriental metallurgy had a 

 singular fascination for him. He would literally gloat 

 over some triumph of Japanese art, and the discovery of 

 by what kind of " pickle," or by what kind of treatment, 

 the lustre or colour or effect on a bronze had been 

 obtained was a delight to him as intense as if 

 he had lighted upon a new metal. The artistic 

 side of his nature found frequent exercise in his 

 work at the Mint, especially in medal-striking. He 

 occasionally chafed under the necessity of having to 

 make use of designs for which he had no sympathy, 

 but he had a real delight in reproducing, with the 

 highest degree of excellence that the resources at his 

 command permitted, artistic work which his trained 

 judgment and fine critical insight perceived to be good 

 and true. Indeed, this sense of " finish " and feeling for 

 artistic excellence, amounting almost to fastidiousness, 

 was seen, not only in his actual manipulative work and 

 in the way in which he arranged and perfected his 

 experimental illustration, but in the manner and form in 



which he put together and presented any account of his 

 labours. His lectures at the Royal Institution were 

 invariably illustrations of this. Perhaps no man since 

 Tyndall's day ever handled a Friday evening discourse 

 with more tact and skill than did Roberts-Austen. His 

 matter was always fresh, his experiments always 

 interesting, frequently daring and occasionally strikingly 

 original. He never tried to be rhetorical or pretended 

 to be eloquent, but there was a certain literary finish in 

 his sayings, a feeling for epigram, a sense of proportion 

 in arrangement, and, at times, a quiet, subdued touch 

 of humour which altogether made him delightful to 

 listen to. 



Of his innate love for science and of the ardour 

 with which he pursued her, innumerable instances might 

 be given, I shall never forget the manner in which 

 he burst into my room, when at South Kensington, 

 and showed me the first fragment of the beautiful rose- 

 coloured alloy of gold and aluminium he had obtained. 

 His delight was so real and unaffected— his joy almost 

 infantile — as he turned and twisted the glittering frag- 

 ment to the light to illustrate the depth and wonderful 

 brilliancy of its purple. And, too, it was characteristic of 

 him that, as I shared his admiration, he should, unasked, 

 have seized a letter-weight and knocked off a portion of 

 his prize and bade me take it. 



I remember, too, a similar occasion when he carried 

 me off to see the first results of his inquiry into the 

 diffusion of solid metals, and when he showed me 

 the little beads of gold cupelled out of the several 

 sections of the block of lead, which had been standing 

 for days and weeks on a plate of the precious metal, all 

 arranged at the proper intervals of the sections on a 

 diagrammatic representation to actual scale of the leaden 

 block. And I may be pardoned if I recall with satis- 

 faction that, as a consequence of that visit, I was the 

 humble instrument of determining, with the powers that 

 were, the Bakerian lecture of 1896. 



The Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers 

 records that Roberts-Austen published some two dozen 

 papers, for the most part singly, but occasionally in 

 collaboration with Sir Norman Lockyer, Prof. Osmond 

 and the late Dr. Alder Wright. 



They practically all relate to metallurgical problems, or 

 are connected with the scientific side of his duties as an 

 officer of the Mint. They deal with the spectroscopic 

 characters of alloys ; the physical and chemical nature of 

 alloys ; the structure of metals ; the connection between 

 the properties of metals and the periodic law ; and the 

 nature of the hydrogen occluded by palladium and by 

 electro-deposited iron. 



In 1890, at the request of the Alloys Research Com- 

 mittee of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, he 

 began to investigate the effects of small admixture of 

 certain elements on the mechanical and physical pro- 

 perties of the common metals and their alloys. Whilst 

 engaged on that work, he devised the recording pyro- 

 meter, an instrument which has proved to be of the 

 greatest value, not only to the investigator in pure science, 

 but also to the practical metallurgist. The results of 

 these investigations are embodied in reports to the 

 Institution of Mechanical Engineers, which afford a 

 mass of valuable information concerning the structure of 

 metals and their alloys, and their behaviour under 

 varying physical conditions. 



It was in the domain of physical metallurgy that he 

 specially excelled, and by his unwearied energy, by his 

 skill and resourcefulness as an experimentalist, he has 

 succeeded in clearing up much that was vague and im- 

 perfectly understood in that field of inquiry. 



He is the author of an " Introduction to the Study of 

 Metallurgy," which has been characterised as a masterly 

 guide to a knowledge of the principles on which the art 

 is based. 



NO. 



1727, VOL. 67] 



