FEBRUARY 4, 1904] 
NATURE 
329 
Indeed, Dr. Salmon had no small share in the origin- 
ation of the academic council—‘ to cooperate (with 
the Board) and have a share in the regulation of the 
Studies, Lectures, and Examinations . . . and in the 
appointment and election of Professors,’’ but during 
his masterful tenure of the provostship the power of 
the council was not of importance. Enough has been 
said to show the difficulty of Dr. Salmon’s office as 
the head of a responsible board overloaded with duties 
of the most multifarious kind—a board composed of | 
eight men whose united ages at one time approached 
if they did not exceed the magnificent total of five 
hundred and eighty years. 
However, Salmon was not an old man at seventy, 
nor, indeed, at eighty, nor did he appear so at eighty- 
four to anyone who had the good fortune to enjoy at his 
most hospitable table the delightful flow of his quaint 
and simple humour. No doubt he did in his later 
years grow weary of prolonged controversy, and he 
was willing to put things off with “It will do very 
well for my time,’’ or he would use his inimitable 
powers of ridicule or employ the most fantastic and 
ingenious arguments to crush any proposal that had 
not his approval. It might have been otherwise had 
his duties been less laborious, had he not felt con- 
strained to rule the board with a rod of iron, had he, 
in fact, more time to consider matters which did not 
claim his immediate atiention, yet perhaps he did not 
fully realise the enormous changes that had taken 
place in Trinity College during his connection with it 
—changes due to the growth of knowledge and to the 
varied conditions of the tenure of fellowship. Since 
Dr. Salmon obtained fellowship the number of pro- | 
fessorships and lectureships has been just doubled. 
When he entered the college the celibacy statute was 
in force, and with few exceptions fellows were obliged 
to take orders. Rich livings and church preferment 
were to be had. It was possible even for a professor 
of astronomy to step into a bishopric. Many of the 
professorships then held by fellows or by ex-fellows 
are held by fellows no longer. A new and most im- 
portant body of men has come into existence—the non- 
fellow professors—men hardly thought of in the days 
when all power and all authority was vested in the 
provost and the seven senior iellows. The senior 
fellows are not what they were just before Salmon’s 
time. The allurements of matrimony or the seduc- 
tions of great ecclesiastical positions used to produce 
a rapid flux, and a senior fellow was generally 
coopted in the prime of life—not as now the survivor 
of a set of men whose constitutions have been most 
thoroughly tested by the rigours of an appalling ex- 
amination. 
Though Salmon was one of the first to experience 
these changes, they did not appear to him to warrant 
any corresponding adjustment in college affairs, and 
some deplore his inaction, yet Trinity College must be 
ever grateful to her late provost for the noble con- 
servatism with which he defended her independence. 
He claimed to be the Ordinary of the college chapel, 
and would not admit the jurisdiction of the Archbishop 
of Dublin. He took a leading part in the provisions 
relating to the position of the divinity school, which 
is absolutely free from clerical domination, its pro- 
fessors being elected by the board on their merits and 
on their merits alone. Moreover, it must be remem- 
bered that the board is now being recruited from 
fellows only three of whom have taken orders out of 
the thirty-five elected since the obligation to take orders 
was repealed; that there is absolutely no religious test 
for fellowship candidates, so that it is theoretically 
possible that a board exclusively composed of 
Mohammedans may at some time be called upon to 
elect the professors in divinity. He was willing to 
No. 1788, von. 69] 
; on 
afford Roman Catholics every facility for religious 
exercises within the walls of Trinity College, but he 
would suffer no clerical interference, whether from the 
Church of Ireland or the Church of Rome. Indeed, 
those who know anything of Trinity College can detect 
little of the ‘‘ Protestant atmosphere ’’ which its 
opponents say is so oppressive there, though there may 
be an ‘‘ anti-clerical atmosphere,’’ if we take the phrase 
t> mean that clerical interference will not be tolerated 
in the teaching of divinity, science or letters. 
Those who had the privilege of knowing Salmon 
will think of him as a man—not as the great mathe- 
matician, the great theologian or the great head of 
affairs. As a man he was superb—the kindest of 
friends, the keenest and most subtle of opponents, the 
most charming and delightful of companions, the best 
of men. His figure was well known in Dublin—nearly 
every afternoon he might be seen wandering through 
the streets; he was a great lover of music, a great 
chess-player, an omnivorous reader of novels. For 
many years he was greatly attracted by the theory of 
numbers !—he said it almost amounted to a disease 
with him, and he was often seen avoiding the tedium 
of some meeting by scribbling on his scraps of paper 
in his search for primes and for periods of recurring 
decimals. Yet he toolx the widest interest in ordinary 
matters. Many Dubliners will recollect their astonish- 
ment at seeing the venerable provost less than a year 
ago leaving Kingstown on an exceedingly rough day 
in a small boat to visit the Channel Fleet, which lay 
at some considerable distance outside the harbour. 
Many a time he has surprised his friends by writing to 
them from some remote Swiss valley inaccessible to 
many a far younger man. 
Salmon’s first paper was published in 1844, “ On the 
Properties of Surfaces of the Second Degree which 
Correspond to the Theorems of Pascal and Brianchon 
Conic Sections’? (Phil. Mag., xxiv.); his last 
mathematical paper was ‘‘On Periods in the Reci- 
procals of Primes”? (Messengev of Mathematics, 1873, 
pp. 49-51). The majority of his papers have reference 
to numerical characteristics relating to curves and 
surfaces, and many of these results are summarised 
in the great chapter ‘‘on the order of restricted 
systems of equations’? in his ‘* Modern Higher 
Algebra.”? It would be most unfair to Salmon to judge 
of his contributions to mathematics by his papers 
alone. He had a great dislike to the physical trouble 
of writing ; he modestly communicated his discoveries 
to friends or reserved them for incorporation in his 
books, so that it is a matter of extreme difficulty to 
say how much is his. Apart from his discovery of new 
facts, the methods employed in his books must have 
been of tremendous service in promoting the advance 
of mathematics. His style was characterised by a com- 
plete absence of pedantry and by profound common 
sense. By a few words, by some geometrical illustra- 
tion, he dispensed with pages of troublesome analysis. 
| At times the great condensation of his diction may 
conceal from the casual student the width and the 
depth of his conclusions, but on referring to an original 
memoir from which he quotes one is amazed to find 
that every essential point is reproduced, and that fre- 
quently some brilliant addition has been made and left 
unclaimed by him. It must not be supposed that 
Salmon shared the characteristic attributed to 
MacCullagh of shirking analysis and trusting to his 
great geometrical insight. On the contrary, he seemed 
to revel in analysis so tedious and so intricate that it 
would be distasteful to most mathematicians. He 
says,” ‘‘ By means of the differential equation I calcu- 
1 Having nearly completed a book on this subject, he burned it for some 
unknown reason. 
3 
2 ‘* Treatise on Modern Higher Algebra,” art. 260. 
