June 13, 1901] 



iVA TURE 



161 



the prominent meteorologists of the countries where there 

 is a great popular demand for weather shooting, Styria, 

 Hungary, Italy, Switzerland and France, are unanimous 

 in the desire that the demand may lead to definite in- 

 vestigation of the nature of the processes taking place 

 in thunderstorms, and especially in the formation of hail, 

 which will lead to a real advance in our knowledge of 

 these phenomena and will furnish a satisfactory basis 

 for a theory of weather shooting. W. N. Shaw. 



VIRIAMU JONES. 

 V/^ET another gap in the front rank of science. But 

 ^ yesterday it was Fitzgerald, then Rowland, and 

 now — Viriamu Jones is dead, the last, like the first, 

 especially great in inspiring others. 



Son of a working collier, a collier with rare gifts, the 

 "poet-preacher" of Wales who thrilled with his silver 

 tongue the gathered thousands and moved the multitude 

 with his mighty eloquence, Viriamu inherited all those 

 qualities which tend to greatness and came into daily 

 contact with them in his own home. His very name 

 indicated what was expected of him, for "Viriamu" was 

 the name of the martyr missionary Williams, rendered 

 as best it could be by the Polynesian tongue. 



At the earliest permissible age of sixteen, Jones passed 

 the London matriculation examination and won the 

 scholarship in geology, the subject in which he took his 

 degree with first-class honours three years later. Mean- 

 while he was gaining prizes, medals and scholarships at 

 University College, London, and was elected Bracken- 

 bury scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. Going there 

 at the age of twenty, he came under the direct influence 

 of Jowett and commenced that personal friendship which 

 influenced his whole life. After obtaining a first class in 

 mathematical moderations in the final school of mathe- 

 matics and in the final natural science school, he was 

 elected principal and professor of mathematics and physics 

 in the Firth College, Sheffield, when only twenty-five. 



How he used to laugh because he always knew exactly 

 what an examiner wanted ; and what a true estimate did 

 he form of the poverty of the examination system to test 

 a man's real powers. How sympathetic was he when 

 one was despondent at the unpractical character of the 

 "intellectual miser," the student who spends his time 

 acquiring and hoarding knowledge without giving the 

 world a single new idea of his own. His views on edu- 

 cation were of the broadest ; to him the study of Greek 

 and Latin, a problem in mathematics, the adjustment of 

 a Whitworth measuring machine, were all equally living, 

 and in the niceties of all three he showed the same 

 absorbing interest. 



No wonder, then, that when the first principal of the 

 LIniversity College of South Wales had to be appointed 

 the council chose the youngest of the thirty applicants 

 — for that youngest was Jones in his twenty-seventh 

 year. And no appointment ever made was better justified. 

 The many speeches to his memory, the letters that have 

 flowed in from every side, including one from the King, 

 all prove how the work of the principal was appreciated, 

 how the man was idolised. 



He placed the University College system of Wales on 

 a truly educational and democratic basis, and shaped the 

 educational policy of his country by formulating the 

 system of secondary education, which fills the gap 

 between the primary schools and the colleges, and by 

 the part he played in establishing a University for 

 Wales. 



The charm of his personality, his magic smile, the 

 grace of his diction and his winning persuasiveness 

 secured success where others could but court failure. 

 Some 70,000/. he gathered together for the building 

 of the new college, but a free site was still wanting, 

 for this had been refused by the Corporation last 



NO. 1650, VOL. 64] 



summer, when Jones was too ill to be m England. 

 Returning, however, in the autumn, he sought an 

 interview, as a belated member of the deputation, 

 charmed the Corporation into reversing their decision, 

 and won for his college a site as a free gift. Well might 

 Sir William Harcourt, when Chancellor of the Ex- 

 chequer, jocularly say that Principal Jones was the 

 cleverest beggar he had ever met with, and about the only 

 one he could not get rid of without promising to give 

 what was asked for. 



Deep is the gratitude the college feels for its first 

 principal ; sincere is the praise Wales is reverently 

 showering on the young first Vice-Chancellor of its 

 University. 



During the last few years I saw much of Viriamu 

 Jones in connection with the construction of electrical 

 standards, and I was always struck with surprise 

 at the way in which one who found his greatest re- 

 laxation in studying the poetry of the most regular and 

 attentive of his father's congregation — Robert Browning 

 — discussed in detail why he thought the physical theories 

 of the day too fanciful, and criticised the modern electrical 

 measuring instruments for not being constructed on en- 

 gineering lines. 



His immediate ambition was to provide the National 

 Physical Laboratory with electrical standards constructed 

 like well-designed engineering machine tools rather than 

 the ordinary physical laboratory apparatus, and it was 

 towards such an end that his scientific work of recent 

 years tended. .A. certain City company had promised 

 him the funds for a far more perfect Lorenz apparatus 

 than any yet made, and many were our talks about 

 its details, how the coil and rotating disc were to be 

 horizontal, and the non-magnetic driver a turbine, &c. 



His first paper on this particular subject of electrical 

 standards was published in iSSS, and consisted of a de- 

 termination of the coefficient of mutual induction of a 

 circle and coaxial helix in connection with constructing 

 the coil of a Lorenz apparatus by winding a single layer 

 of wire in a screw thread cut on the surface of a large 

 brass cylinder. For it seemed probable that with such a 

 coil Lord Rayleigh's formula, which is a first approxima- 

 tion, would not give a result of sufificient accuracy, and 

 Jones succeeded by a method of direct integration in 

 obtaining a comparatively simple formula which gave 

 the coefficient of mutual induction with greater ac- 

 curacy, and enabled a single larger coil, the geometry of 

 which can be better known than one of many convolutions, 

 to be employed. In the following year he discussed the 

 employment of Lissajous' figures for determining the rate 

 of rotation of the disc of the Lorenz apparatus and of a 

 Morse receiver for measuring the periodic time of the 

 tuning-fork employed. 



In 1890 he announced, at the meeting of the British 

 Association at Leeds, that with the use of his specially 

 constructed Lorenz apparatus the ohm was equal to the 

 resistance of io6'307 centimetres of mercury one square 

 millimetre in cross-section ato'C, the complete account 

 of the apparatus, its use, the mathematical calculations 

 employed and the results obtained being published in the 

 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1891. 

 Three years later he was elected a Fellow of that Society. 

 .Appendix iii. of the 1893 Report of the British .Associa- 

 tion Committee on electrical standards consists of the 

 results of his use of the Lorenz apparatus to measure 

 directly the value of commercial low resistances of the 

 order of 1,5000th of an ohm with an accuracy of one 

 part in 12,000, as contrasted with the comparison of 

 such resistances with a known standard in the ordinary 

 ways. Appendix ii. of the 1S94 Report deals with a 

 determination of the ohm by measuring the absolute 

 value of the resistances of a combination of four coils 

 which had been compared with the standards of resist- 

 ance in the Cavendish Laboratory ; while in .Appendix ii. 



