512 
NATURE 
; 
[APRIL 1, 1897 
MR. We. W. RUNDELL. 
A. LARGE circle connected with the British Mer- 
cantile Marine, besides many others interested 
in magnetic science, will regret to learn that W. W. 
Rundell, so long associated with Liverpool and its nau- 
tical affairs, died a few weeks ago at the advanced age 
of eighty-one. 
We first hear of Rundell in 1845, when he became 
Secretary of the Cornwall Polytechnic Society, a post 
which he held until 1855, when he was appointed 
Secretary of the Liverpool Compass Committee. 
It will be remembered that this Committee sat during 
the years 1855-57, and by 1860 had made three reports 
to the Board of Trade on the magnetism of a majority of 
the iron ships leaving the port of Liverpool, the necessary 
compensations to be made for the resulting deviations of 
ship’s compasses, and the proper equipment and placing 
of such compasses. This was a work of the highest im- 
portance at a time when iron ships were rapidly increas- 
Ing in numbers, and much danger existed in their 
navigation from the ignorance which prevailed on the 
subject. 
To Rundell was entrusted the details of the experi- 
mental investigations, and the keeping the necessary 
records of proceedings, an onerous post which he occupied 
with great zeal and marked perception in reducing and 
coordinating a mass of results, often of an apparently 
contradictory nature. 
In the spring of 1857 the Liverpool Compass Committee 
was dissolved, and Rundell was appointed Secretary of 
the Underwriters’ Association of Liverpool ; but for the 
succeeding three and a half years he worked during his 
leisure hours at the preparation of the valuable third 
Report of the Liverpool Compass Committee, and this 
altogether as an honorary task. 
Although in many questions relating to the magnetism 
of ships he was ready to work cordially with Smith and 
Evans, who were then carrying on an important work 
connected with the magnetism of ships in the Royal 
Navy, Rundell had one important difference of opinion 
with them—as regards the mechanical correction of 
compasses. 
Smith and Evans objected strongly to compensating 
the standard compasses of ships by magnets and soft 
iron, advocating reliance upon deviation tables for cor- 
recting the compass courses steered. Rundell, supported 
by his friend Towson, insisted on the complete compen- 
sation of compass errors, so strongly advocated by Airy 
the inventor of the methods of doing so. The Mercantile 
Navy followed him, and he has lived to see the Royal 
Navy more bent on rigorous compensation than the 
Mercantile. 
In 1862 he contributed an excellent paper on compass 
equipment in iron ships to the Institution of Naval 
Architects, followed by another on the same subject in 
1866. This latter paper contained a vigorous protest 
against Government supervision of merchant vessels as 
regards their compasses, and especially to placing the 
regulation of their equipment under the control of the 
Admiralty Compass Department, as proposed by the 
Royal Society to the Board of Trade, but declined by the 
Board. 
Rundell, however, did not content himself with a 
protest, but made some excellent propositions, which 
for the most part have been adopted by the Board of 
Trade. 
Zealous and painstaking in whatever he undertook, firm 
in any position which his well-balanced mind caused him 
to take up, Rundell was of a kindly disposition and sur- 
rounded by friends, many of whom he has survived. He 
has left an indelible mark on the service to the benefit of 
which so many years of his life were devoted. 
E. Wee 
NO. 1431, VOL. 55 | 
NOTES 
ON Monday last, Lord Lister’s professional brethren gave a 
visible sign of their high regard for him, and their apprecia- 
tion of his work, by presenting his portrait, executed by Mr. 
W. W. Ouless, R.A., to the Royal College of Surgeons. In 
making the presentation on behalf of the subscribers, Mr. Davies 
Colley remarked that before long he hoped that those thousands 
who owed life and health to Lord Lister’s discoveries would 
show their gratitude by founding some institution, or raising 
some great monument in his honour. There was, however, a 
special fitness in having a portrait painted of one who had done 
so much to advance the science of surgery, and placing the 
picture side by side with the portraits of John Hunter, Astley 
Cooper, and the other great surgeons who had done similar 
work, Sir William MacCormac, President of the College, in 
accepting the portrait, pointed out that a revelation in surgery, 
one of the most beneficent which has happened in our time, 
has been the result of Lister’s patient investigation. It was 
not necessary to enter into details as to the incalculable benefit 
which has flowed from the application of antiseptic principles 
to surgery. Every surgeon must feel a debt of personal grati- 
tude to the man who enabled operations in surgery to be 
practised with a safety and in a manner heretofore unknown. 
In the course of a brief reply, Lord Lister is reported by the 
Times to have said: ‘*It would be affectation to deny that I 
feel this occasion to be one of extreme gratification. I cannot 
but be conscious that it is a very high personal honour and a 
remarkable token of esteem and kindly feeling on the part of 
my colleagues in the noble profession of surgery. But I con- 
fess I feel it still more gratifying as a remarkable indication of 
the general acceptance of the principles which I have for so 
long a time striven to establish and to promulgate. Iam glad 
this meeting cannot be regarded in any sense as a mere meeting 
of congratulation on the distinction, great as Iam bound to say I 
feel it to be, which it has pleased Her Majesty to confer upon 
me, because this project of a portrait was set going before that 
honour was thought of. This circumstance makes the occasion 
still more markedly a tribute to the truth and importance of 
antiseptic principles. Those principles are now more and more 
recognised throughout our profession, and with increasing benefit 
to mankind. I was reading only to-day a pamphlet which was. 
sent to me by the author, Dr. Coaley, of New York. In it it 
was stated that in 360 antiseptic operations for the radical cure 
of hernia, only one death occurred, not caused apparently by 
the operation, but by the anesthetic ether given to a child with 
weak lungs. An achievement like that is enough to cause glad- 
ness in the heart of any man who loves his fellow-men. And 
yet I cannot help remarking that such results could not have 
been obtained by the mere recognition of the truth or import- 
ance of antiseptic principles. Such success implied that the 
operator was not only convinced of the truth of those principtes, 
but also that he vigilantly maintained throughout his operations 
that earnest care which is necessary to prevent those principles. 
from being contravened.” 
Pror. HERMANN Munk has been elected president of the 
Berlin Physiological Society, in succession to the late Prof. Du 
Bois Reymond, 
Tue Swedish Academy of Agriculture of Stockholm has: 
awarded its gold medal to Prof. J. Eriksson, for his researches. 
on the rust of cereals. 
A CoMMITYEE has been formed to collect international sub- 
scriptions for the erection of a memorial to the late Prof. Galileo 
Ferraris in the Royal Industrial Museum, Turin. 
: 
