246 
NATURE 
[May 7, 1914 
he passed away, to witness the son installed in the 
chair vacated by -himself only a few years 
previously...» .. 
The great task of his life completed in 1910, 
Suess’s closing years have been happy and restful, 
for only quite recently came the bronchial affection 
which terminated his life in his eighty-fourth year. 
Suess held much the same position among 
German-speaking peoples as did Huxley among 
English and Americans. They both held that, in 
addition to their scientific labours, however exact- 
ing these might be, something in the way of 
service was due to the cities in which they lived 
and the states to which they belonged. In 1862 
Suess had directed attention to the unsatisfactory 
condition of the water-supply of Vienna, and, from 
1863 to 1873, he was called upon to serve as a 
member of the Municipal Council of Vienna; it 
was due to his initiative in this capacity that an 
aqueduct, 110 kilometres long, was built to bring 
water from the Alps to the city, and that other 
great improvements in the sanitary conditions of 
Vienna were undertaken. For more than thirty 
years he was a member of the Lower House of the 
Reichsrath, and proved himself a doughty champion 
against the defenders of political privileges and of 
clericalism. Like Huxley, he declined many offers 
of honours and titles from the State, but was 
amply compensated by the marks of esteem from 
his fellow-workers in science. He was president 
of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a member of 
the French Institute, Foreign Member of the Royal 
Society since 1894, and member of scientific 
societies in every part of the world. He received 
the Wollaston medal of the Geological Society in 
1896, and the Copley medal of the Royal Society 
in 1903. Joun W. Jupp. 
ROBERT KAYE GRAY. 
i is with deep regret that we have to record 
the death of Mr. Robert Kaye Gray, who 
passed away on April 28, at Brighton, after a 
long illness, at the age of sixty-two. He was 
well known as the managing director of the India- 
Rubber, Gutta-Percha, and Telegraph Works Co. 
at Silvertown, but his interests extended far be- 
yond the range of commerce, and he became assv- 
ciated with many institutions and societies for the 
improvement of natural knowledge, and for the 
welfare of the sick and needy. His attractive 
personality, his quiet way of doing good, his un- 
bounded generosity, the breadth of his mind, and 
his exceptional store of worldly wisdom, made him 
the centre of a multiplicity of activities; and there 
is no doubt that in recent years the constant 
demand made upon his powers and judgment 
hastened the end of his remarkable career. 
Readers of Nature will recall how large a share 
Mr. Gray took in establishing and supporting the 
National Physical Laboratory. He had the satis- 
faction of seeing the laboratory extend in scope 
and usefulness, and his name will always be asso- 
ciated with that of the late Sir William White in 
possibilities. His loss will be keenly felt by the 
Institution of Electrical Engineers, of which he 
| was a past president, by the Royal Society of 
Arts, and the Institute of Metals, to which he 
rendered substantial help. ; 
The cause of technical and university education 
in London has also suffered by the loss of Mr. 
Robert Gray, who gave freely of his time and from 
the fund of his experience to aid in their advance. 
His association with submarine telegraphy brought 
him into touch with engineers and others in every 
quarter of the globe, and it is not too much to 
say that he was universally esteemed and 
honoured. 
From his father, the late Matthew Gray, an 
engineer of high ideals and remarkable strength of 
character, Mr, Gray inherited a mind intent upon 
accomplishing large things by straight means, 
Early in his professional life he set himself to 
master every branch of submarine telegraph 
engineering, including the manufacture, laying, 
and testing of cables.. This knowledge and ex- 
perience was the basis of his subsequent pro- 
fessional work, and it led him ultimately towards 
that field of natural science of a practical kind, 
which afforded him full scope for his energies. In 
the history of the progress of the age through 
which he passed he must be assigned a place as a 
representative man, and as a man of affairs. He 
was representative of the age in which commerce 
became a science, and science a refining influence 
—the age in which science was at last seen to be 
consistent with benevolence. 
NOTES. 
America has lost one of her foremost astronomers 
by the death, in his seventy-seventh year, of Dr. 
George William Hill. He graduated at Rutgers Col- 
lege in 1859, and in 1861 became an assistant in the 
office of the American Ephemeris and Nautical 
Almanack. He afterwards became chief of this pub- 
lication. From 1898 to 1901 he was lecturer in celes- 
tial mechanics at Columbia University, New York. 
In 1887 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded him 
its gold medal for his researches in connection with 
the lunar theory. He was a foreign member of that 
society, and also of the Royal Society, and a corre- 
sponding member of the Institute of France. In 1892 
Cambridge University conferred on him its honorary 
Sc.D. He was president of the American Mathe- 
matical Society from 1894 to 1896. In 1905 the 
Carnegie Institution published a volume of his col- 
lected mathematical works, with an introduction by 
Henri Poincaré. Dr. Hill was also the author of 
a work on ‘The Theory of Jupiter and Saturn,” 
Mr. C. S. S. Prrrce, an American mathematician 
and logician of international reputation, has died at 
the age of seventy-four. He was a son of Prof. Ben- 
jamin Peirce, of Harvard, and was himself educated 
at that University. For a few years he was a teacher 
of logic in Johns Hopkins University, and he gave 
occasional lectures at Harvard, but the greater part 
of his life was devoted to study and research. Since 
the pioneer work of giving direction to its latent | 1887 he had lived in seclusion in a little cabin in the 
NO: 2323, VOR. 103) 
