Obituary— Sir W. W. Smyth, F.R.S., etc. 383 



OBITUARY- 

 SIR WARINGTON WILKINSON SMYTH, M.A., F.R.S. 



For. Sec. Geol. Soc, F.R.G.S. ; Lecturer on Mining at the Royal School of Mines, 

 and Inspector of Mineral Property of the Duchy of Cornwall and the Crown. 



Born 1817; Died 19th June, 1890. 



Sir Warington W. Smyth (whose sudden death from heart disease 

 we recorded in our last Number) was the eldest son of Admiral 

 W. H. Smith, D.C.L., F.R.S., etc., and was born in 1817 at Naples. 

 His mother was the only daughter of Mr. Thomas Warington, 

 British Consul at that city. He was educated at Westminster and 

 Bedford Schools and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he dis- 

 tinguished himself, among other ways, as an oarsman, rowing in 

 the winning University Crew on the Thames in 1839. In this year 

 he took his B.A. degree, and, having gained a travelling bachelorship, 

 commenced a journey which extended over a period of more than 

 four years, and was mainly devoted to a study of the mineral 

 products and mining industries of Germany, Austria, Hungary, 

 European Turkey, and Asia Minor, in the course of which he laid 

 the foundation of that solid and practical knowledge of these subjects 

 which made him throughout his life one of our greatest authorities 

 upon them. On his return to England in 1844, he was appointed 

 by Sir Henry De la Beche to a post on the Geological Survey, and 

 in 1851, on the formation of the Royal School of Mines in Jermyn 

 Street, he became Lecturer on Mineralogy, and on Mining, retaining 

 the former chair till 1881, and the latter to his death. About the 

 same time he was appointed Inspector of the Mineral Property of 

 the Duchy of Cornwall, and soon afterwards Chief Mineral Inspector 

 to the Crown, under the Commissioners of Woods, Forests, and Land 

 Revenues. For the Geological Society he has done good service, having 

 been one of the Honorary Secretaries from 1856 to 1866, President in 

 1866 and 1867, and Foreign Secretary for the last 16 years. In 

 1879 he was appointed Chairman of the Royal Commission on 

 Accidents in Coal Mines, to the duties of which office he devoted 

 much labour, in addition to the performance of his ordinary 

 professional work during the seven years in which the Commission 

 was sitting. For this and other public services he received the 

 honour of knighthood in 1887. Besides various technical reports 

 and contributions to purely scientific literature, he published in 

 1856 a book entitled "A Year with the Turks," and in 1867 

 " A Rudimentary Treatise on Coal and Coal Mining," a standard 

 work now in its sixth edition, which has been translated into the 

 principal European and also the Chinese languages. Although he 

 was not a man who cared much to place himself before the world, 

 he commanded the respect and esteem of all who came into contact 

 with him in no common degree, and it will be difficult to replace 

 him in the particular branches of Science which he had made especi- 

 ally his own. He may be said almost to have died in harness; for, 

 notwithstanding that he had been for some months out of health 



