Obituary — Sir George Howard Darwin. 477 



THE LATE HEEBEET KELSALL SLATEE. 



Sir, — I am informed by Dr. W. F. Smeeth, the principal officer of 

 the Geological Department of Mysore, that a fund is being formed to 

 make some provision for the family of Mr. H. K. Slater of that 

 department, who died recently from the bite of a large Russell's 

 viper while engaged in Geological Survey work in the Shimoga 

 District. An obituary, in which his services to geology are recorded, 

 appeared in this Magazine in July last. He leaves three young 

 children almost entirely unprovided for, and it is urgently necessary 

 to raise a sum sufficient for their upbringing and education. 



Contributions may be sent either to Dr. "W. F. Smeeth, Bangalore, 

 India, or to me at the address below. 



John W. Evans. 



iMPERiAii Institute, 

 London, S.W. 



SIR GEORGE HOWARD DARWIN, 



K.C.B., M.A., LL.D., D.Sc, F.E.S. 



BoKN July 9, 1845. Died December 7, 1912. 



In his opening Address to the British Association the President, 

 Sir Oliver Lodge, writes (Birmingham, September 10) : " Through 

 the untimely death of Sir George Darwin the world has lost a mathe- 

 matical astronomer whose work on the tides and allied phenomena 

 is a monument of power and achievement. So recently as August, 

 1905, on our visit to South Africa, he occupied the Presidential 

 Chair." It was on his return to England after his visit to South 

 Africa that he received the honour of Knight Commander of the Bath 

 from His Majesty. 



The second son of the late Charles E,. Darwin (author of The Origin 

 of Species, etc.), George Darwin was born at Down, Kent, in 1845, 

 and was educated privately by the E,ev. Charles Pritchard (later 

 Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford). He entered Trinity 

 College, Cambridge, in 1864, and graduated as a Second Wrangler 

 and Smith's Prizeman in 1868, and in that year he was elected to 

 a Fellowship at Trinity College, which he held 1868-78, and to 

 which he was re-elected in 1884. At first he studied the law, and 

 was called to the Bar in 1874, but returned to Cambridge, where he 

 spent the rest of his life, devoting himself to Solar Mathematics. His 

 Collected Papers, which form four volumes, were recently published 

 by the Cambridge University Press. In 1884 he was chosen 

 Plumian Professor of Astronomy in Cambridge. 



Sir George Darwin's writings had a most important bearing on 

 Dynamical Geology, especially " On the influence of Geological 

 Changes on the Earth's Axis of Rotation" (Phil. Trans., 1877), 

 " On the bodily Tides of viscous and semi-elastic Spheroids and on 

 the Ocean Tides on a yielding Nucleus" (op. cit., 1879), " On the 

 Precession of a viscous Spheroid and on the Remote History of the 

 Earth" (op. cit., 1879), and "On the Secular Changes in the 



