November iq, 1908] 



NATURE 



75 



problem his very thorough acquaintance with a few 

 fundamental principles. 



No marks were ever giv-en for lecture notes, but 

 rough laboratory notes and finished accounts of 

 laboratory work in good English, with elaborate 

 sketches and squared-paper curves, were thought 

 most important. When a hundred students pass 

 through laboratories of no large dimensions in one 

 week, some system must be adopted, and the educa- 

 tion cannot be ideally perfect, especially when the 

 nuniber of instructors is limited. But great encour- 

 agement was given to any student who adventured 

 and discovered things of which he had not been told 

 anything, .\dvanced students had fine opportunities 

 for original research. 



From i,SS4 until he died Ayrton was professor of 

 electrical engineering at the City and Guilds Central 

 College, .South Kensington. The laboratory here 

 became a sort of developed combination of that at 

 Finsbury and the one in Japan. In my opinion, there 

 is no electrical laboratory in the world that can com- 

 pare with the Kensington laboratory, whether we 

 look at it from the educational or from the research 

 point of view. He always said that much of its suc- 

 cess was due to the helpfulness of Mr. Mather. 



In dealing with students, that earnestness and 

 enthusiasm and inspiration, that training in scientific 

 method, that sympathy and helpfulness for others 

 which he received from Lord Kelvin, he handed on to 

 many thousands of pupils, and they in turn are 

 handing them on to new generations. 



" The Electricians' Directory " speaks of about 150 

 papers published, usually in collaboration with myself, 

 Mather, and others, in the Proceedings and Trans- 

 actions of the Royal .Society, Physical Society, Institu- 

 tion of Electrical Engineers, and other societies, 

 giving the titles of the most important, and it gives 

 the names of some of the numerous inventions with 

 which Ayrton alone or with others has benefited the 

 world. The time from 1879 to 1884 was a particularly 

 happy one. There are now hundreds of schools where 

 men may learn electrical science ; in most of them his 

 pupils are teaching. There are now thousands of 

 electrical engineers in whose emplovment a man can 

 obtain experience. Hut at that time there was only 

 one school, there was almost only one office in which 

 and there was almost only one engineer in whose 

 service, education and experience could be found. 

 Every young man of promise, every engineer with 

 ambition, was attracted from Germanv, America, and 

 elsewhere to the place where new discoveries and 

 new inventions were the order of the day. It was a 

 glorious time, that pioneering time when evervthing 

 planted was fruitful, when everything tried was suc- 

 cessful. Those discoveries are now- such common 

 knowledge, those inv'entions are such usual parts of 

 all electrical machinerv, that nobodv dreams of men- 

 tioning their author's name in connection with them. 



I remember once, in 1886, sitting at a meeting of 

 the Institution of Electrical Engineers beside Prof. 

 Ayrton, and, looking over the large audience, I was 

 able to say that nearly three-quarters of the people 

 present were .Ayrton 's old students. 



He loved the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 

 and it was no wonder, for it w-as the mirror of his 

 life. It gave a setting and a value to all his life's 

 work and all he cared for. It gave a scope for that 

 energy, that earnestness, that untiring industry, that 

 hatred of inaction which was his most intense charac- 

 teristic. Me was a member of it almost from the 

 beginning; his speeches during discussions form some 

 of the best reading in its proceedings; he was a 

 diligent attender at general meetings, at council meet- 

 ings, and at meetings of the numerous committees. 

 His love for it was that of a nurse or mother for 

 NO. 2038, VOL. 79] 



the boy whom she has seen grow up to splendid 

 manhood. 



Since 1879, when he lectured on electrical trans- 

 mission of power at Sheffield, Prof. .Ayrton delivered 

 many popular lectures, and each of them may be 

 said to have been epoch-making. He acted on many 

 juries and congresses. He was president of Section A 

 of the British Association in 1898, president of the 

 Physical Society in i8go, president of the Institution 

 of Electrical Engineers in 1892. He became a Fellow 

 of the Royal Society in 1881, and in 1901 he was 

 awarded a Royal medal by the ku\al Societv for his 

 scientific work. 



His first wife was his cousin, Matilda Chaplin, 

 one of the famous pioneering Edinburgh medical 

 students; their daughter Edith, now Mrs. Israel 

 Zangwill, was born in Japan. His second wife is 

 well know'n as the only woman member of the In- 

 stitution of Electrical Engineers ; she was awarded 

 the Hughes medal of the Royal Society for her 

 scientific work in 1906; their daughter Barbara has 

 already published a physiological investigation. 



When I first knew him in Japan the motto printed 

 on his notepaper was " Energy. " It was his motto 

 through life, or rather his motto was " Earnestness." 



He had a keen sense of justice and a high regard 

 for truth. His mere presence often caused the tone of 

 conversation to be raised. The ideals towards which 

 he worked incessantly were noble ideals. In his own 

 lifetime great progress had been made towards their 

 realisation, but occasionally he was despondent, parti- 

 cularly towards the end, when his ailing body could 

 not respond to his vehement spirit. He could not see 

 that all the noble things for which he had worked were 

 being worked for now by numerous energetic young 

 men, most of whom had been inspired bv himself. 

 It was sad to watch him towards the end, the active 

 mind warring with the weak body. I felt often that 

 I wanted to say with Kent in the old play, " O, let 

 him pass ! He hates him that would upon the rack 

 of this rough world stretch him out longer." 



John Perrv. 



nOTKS. 

 Sir \Vn,MAM Ramsay, K.C.B., F.R.S., and Dr. G. W. 

 Hill liavp been elected corresponding members of the 

 Bavari.in .Academy of Sciences. 



M. Louis-FfiLix Henneguy, professor of comparative 

 embryogeny in the College de France, has been elected a 

 member of the Paris .Academy of Sciences. 



Mr. James Swinburne, F.R.S., has been elected presi- 

 dent of the Junior Institution of Engineers, in succession 

 to the late M. Gustave Canet. 



We learn from Science that the Nichols medal of the 

 American Chemical Society has been awarded to Prof. 

 \V. .A. Noyes, of the University of Illinois, and Dr. 

 H. C. P. Weber, for their researches on the atomic weight 

 of chlorine. 



The Royal Statistical Society offers the " Howard 

 medal " (bronze) and a grant of 20/. for the best essay on 

 a statistical study of infantile mortality in Great Britain 

 and Ireland and of its causes. The competition is open, 

 and is not limited to Fellows of the Statistical Society. 

 Essays must be sent in before June 20, 1909. 



The eighty-third Christmas course of juvenile lectures, 

 founded at the Royal Institution in 1.826 by Michael 

 Faraday, will be delivered this year by Prof. William 

 Stirling, his subject being "The Wheel of Life." The 



