Jtdy 15, 18S0] 



NATURE 



249 



carriage ; a clock of wondrous simplicity and accuracy, 

 the motive power of which was a drop of water, a fresh 

 drop always waiting ready to be picked up and to give its 

 impulse to the returning arm of the escapement ; a gonio- 

 meter, consisting solely of a block of wood with a straight 

 edge, and an upright wire with its end bent round so as to 

 carry a cork with a second wire on which the crystal was 

 fastened, and by which it was adjusted for measurement on 

 Wollaston's method, the angle between two positions of 

 the straight edge being found by the aid of a pair of 

 compasses and determined by a continued fraction. 

 These are a few only of the marvels of ingenuity which 

 every one admitted to that interesting room will remem- 

 ber ; and there were implements of observation fashioned 

 out of the simplest materials— deal, cork, glass tube, wire 

 — by the hand of their inventor, rough to look at, but 

 exact in their performance. Nor was there any man who 

 better appreciated the elaborate mechanism of an impor- 

 tant instrument ; no one, for instance, who could make 

 an afternoon at the Greenwich Obsen'ator)' more inter- 

 esting and suggestive alike to the instructed student and 

 to the uninformed visitor. 



Such was the work of Miller. Personally he was quiet, 

 unobtrusive, but observant ; retiring, almost shy, in his 

 manner, but in the highest degree genial and full of 

 cordiality when this curtain of instinctive restraint was 

 drawn aside and you met the man himself face to face. 



He was a traveller. Impelled by his old master Whe- 

 well to the study of German as necessary to a mineralo- 

 gist, he spent many a long vacation in the German and 

 Tyrolese haunts of the mineralogist, and lost no oppor- 

 tunity of exchanging speech and therewith winning the 

 esteem of the masters of his science on the Continent. 

 Most of those contemporaries he survived. Mitscher- 

 lich. Gauss (who paid him the just tribute of compliment- 

 ing him with having "exactly hit the nail on the head" 

 in his Crystallography), Dove, Gustav Rose, Haidinger, 

 Breithaupt, Wohler, Sartorius von Waltershausen — names 

 many of them but yesterday of living workers, were those 

 of silent men before Miller's grave was closed, but they 

 and INIiller had in life been united by esteem and regard, 

 and in some cases by warm friendship. 



Of the travels which thus brought friendships and new 

 scenes home to him, and in which he acquired valuable 

 additions to the mineral collection at Cambridge, he had 

 other pleasant records in the sketch-books which his 

 constant companion, Mrs. Miller, filled as they journeyed. 



Those who know the broad strath of the Towey above 

 Llandilo in Carmarthenshire will remember, near its head, 

 in the neighbourhood of Llandovery, a pretty gentleman's 

 seat named Velindra. This was Miller's birthplace. 

 Here his father, Captain Francis Miller, had settled 

 towards the close of the last century, after fighting as an 

 officer in the English army throughout the American War 

 of Independence, and after losing a good estate which 

 he possessed in the Boston Government, and which he 

 never recovered. He too came of a fighting family, and 

 doubtless something of the independence, the reserve and 

 gentlemanly courtesy of the crystallographer came to him 

 through this inheritance. 



The valuable collection of minerals at Cambridge was 

 largely the fruit of Prof. Millei-'s long-vacation rambles. 

 The addition to it of the collection of Mr. Brooke, pre- 

 sented by his son, the late Mr. Charles Brooke, was an 

 appropriate gift, considering the illustrations Miller had 

 so copiously drawn from that collection for the important 

 treatise on Mineralogy, to which he modestly gave the 

 title of an edition of Phillips' "Mineralogy," by Mr. 

 Brooke and himself: the real authorship of all that made 

 the book invaluable to the true mineralogist being his 

 ^yhose name stood last, though for ever greatest, on the 

 title page. 



Some of his later years were devoted to arranging in 

 the New Museum at Cambridge the collection he had 



done so much to form. He did not live to make a cata- 

 logue of it, though Mr. Lewis, who during Prof. Miller's 

 illness was intrusted with the duty of acting for him, has 

 commenced the laborious work of a register, as a 

 preliminary to a catalogue. 



There have been rumours that a change would be 

 made in the character of the chair before the appoint- 

 ment of a successor to Prof. Miller. Considering that 

 but for the two mineralogical chairs at the two great 

 universities of England the study of crystallography 

 otherwise than as an almost childish adjunct to popular 

 lectures on mineralogy would have been extinguishedin 

 England, it may be worth while to mge that the signifi- 

 cance of crystallographic structure as a key to great 

 physical problems, and probably too, when the chemists 

 have awakened to the fact, as a key to some of the newest 

 problems in chemistry, gives to crystallography a very 

 considerable claim for recognition among the subjects 

 taught in the university that produced the greatest 

 crystallographer of our time. N. STOREY MASKELYNE 



PAUL BROCA 



WE regret extremely to have to announce the death of 

 this distinguished physician and anthropologist, 

 which took place suddenly at Paris on Thursday last. He 

 had attended a meeting of the Senate, of which he had 

 lately been elected a member, and died during the night 

 in consequence of the rupture of an aneurism. He was 

 fifty-six years of age, born at St. Foy, in the Gironde, 

 educated for the medical profession, and became Pro- 

 fessor of Surgical Pathology at Paris. He soon acquired 

 a high reputation by his researches in cerebral pathology, 

 and continued to devote himself with great zeal to hospital 

 w^ork and clinical teaching to the last ; but it is chiefly in 

 consequence of his having taken up the subject of anthro- 

 pology that he has obtained a world-wide fame, and occu- 

 pied a position which it will indeed be difficult to fill up. 



Twenty years ago the science of physical or anatomical 

 anthropology was in its infancy, and all investigations 

 were at variance even as to the methods to be pursued in 

 its cultivation. Broca devoted many years of unceasing 

 activity in endeavouring to define, systematise, and perfect 

 these methods. The thoroughness and energy with which 

 he threw himself into any research which he undertook 

 were marvellous, and only equalled by the clearness and 

 facility of expression with which he communicated his 

 results to others. His series of essays on various sub- 

 jects connected with craniometry, pubhshed in successive 

 numbers of the Mcmoires of the Societe' d'Anthropologie 

 of Paris, and the Revue which he founded, and his 

 "Instructions craniologiques et craniometriques," wth 

 the introduction of numerous neat and happily chosen 

 terms for descriptive processes, have made an immense 

 advance in the progress of the science. 



Happily Broca' s perfect simplicity and amiability of 

 character, his pure love of science for its own sake, 

 and his readiness to help those engaged in pursuits 

 similar to his own, have inspired with enthusiasm most of 

 those who came in contact with him ; and he has created 

 at Paris a school which it is to be hoped will carry on the 

 work which he inaugurated. We may take occasion to 

 notice his scientific work in greater detail in an early 

 number. 



THE UNITED STATES WEATHER MAPS, 

 SEPTEMBER, 1878 



IN the description of the United States Weather Maps 

 for August, 187S, attention was drawn to the fact 

 (vol. xxii. p. 36) that in that month atmospheric pressure 

 was under the normal over a broad belt going half- 

 way round the globe, extending from the Rocky Moun- 

 tains across the United States, the Atlantic, Europe, and 

 thence into Asia as far as the valley of the Lena, and the 



