680 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION A. 



appreciation of Kelvin's contributions to Science as illustrated by his communica- 

 tions to this Section, and in this place it is not necessary. But I cannot pass 

 over that feature of his character without notice. 



Closely following on the loss of Kelvin came the death of Sir Richard 

 Strachey, a personal loss to which it is difficult to ^ive expression. I am not 

 aware that he had much to do with Section A. I wish, indeed, that the Section 

 had seen its way to bring him moi'e closely into touch with its proceedings. He 

 was President of Section E in 1875, and, by appointment of the Royal Societj-, he 

 was for twenty-two years Chairman of the Meteorological Council. I had the 

 good fortune to be very closely associated with him during the last ten years of 

 his life, and to realise the ideas which lay behind his official actions and to appre- 

 ciate the reality of his services to science in the past and for the future. 



These losses unfortunately do not stand alone. Only last year Sir John Eliot 

 received the congratulations of all his fellow-workers upon the publication of his 

 Climatological Atlas of India as representing the most conspicuous achievement of 

 orderly, deliberate, purposeful compilation of meteorological facts for a special area 

 that has yet been seen. lie was full of projects for a handbook to accompany the 

 atlas, and of ideas for the prosecution of meteorological research over wide areas 

 by collecting information from all the world and enlisting the active co-operation 

 of the constituent parts of the British Empire in using those observations for the 

 advancement of science and the benefit of mankind. He died quite suddenly on 

 March 18, not young as years go, but quite youthful in the deliberate purpose of 

 manifold scientific activities and in his irrepressible faith in the future of the 

 science which he has adorned. 



The Section will, I hope, forgive me if I put before them some considerations 

 which the careers of these three men suggest. Kelvin, a mathematician, a natural 

 philosopher, a University Professor, some part of whose scientific worli is known 

 to each one of us. He was possessed with the notion that Mathematics and Natural 

 Philosophy are applicable in every part of the work of daily life, and made good 

 the contention by presenting to the world, besides innumerable theoretical papers, 

 instruments of all degrees of complexity, from the harmonic analyser to an im- 

 proved water-tap. It was he who transfigured and transformed the mariner's 

 compass and the lead-line into instruments which liave been of the greatest practical 

 service. It was he who, when experimental science was merely a collection of facts 

 or generalisations, conceived the idea of transfiguring every branch of it by the 

 application of the principles of natural philosophy, as Newton had transfigured 

 astronomy. The ambition of Thomson and Tait's * Natural Philosophy,' of which 

 only the first volume reached the stage of publication, is a fair index of Kelvin's 

 genius. 



Strachey, on the other hand, by profession a military engineer, a great adminis- 

 trator, head of the Public AVorks l)epartnirnt in India, deeply versed in finance 

 and iu all the other constituent parts of administration, by his own natural 

 instinct demanded the assistance of science for e\ ory branch of administration. In 

 promoting the development of botany, of meteorology, of geodesy, and of matlie- 

 matics, he was not administering the patronage of a Maecenas, but claiming the 

 practical service of science in forestry, in agriculture, in famine relief, in public 

 works, and in finance. You cannot gauge Strachey 's services to science by the 

 papers which he contributed to scientific societies, if you leave out of account the 

 fact that they were really incidents in the opening of fresh channels of communi- 

 cation between scientific work and the public service. 



And Eliot, as Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India, an accom- 

 plished mathematician (for he was second wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in 

 1869), a capable and devoted public servant, the medium by which Strachey 's 

 ideas as regards the use of meteorology in administration found expression in the 

 (rovernment of India, who caught the true perception of the place of science in the 

 service of the State, and made his office the indispensable handmaid of the Indian 

 administration. These three men together, who have all passed away within a space 

 of three months, are such representative types of scientific workers, complementary 

 and supplementary that a similar combination is not likely to occur again. AU 



