488 
ever inadequately, to the great loss that has 
come to the university in the departure of one 
of her most efficient and devoted servants, and 
to their profound sense of personal bereave- 
ment in the death of a staunch friend and 
wise counsellor. 
With the exception of a three-year period of 
service in the United States Navy, Professor 
Spangler has been a member of the faculty of 
the university since 1881. For more than a 
quarter of a century he has labored for the ad- 
vancement of the important interests com- 
mitted to his trust, with a singleness of pur- 
pose and a self-sacrificing devotion that 
served as an inspiration to his associates, 
from the humblest to the highest. Endowed 
with quick initiative, resourcefulness, cour- 
age and self-reliance, his qualities of leader- 
ship stood out at their best at times of 
emergencies, such as the destruction by fire of 
the old Mechanical Engineering Building, and 
the almost immediate and orderly resumption 
of activities in an incomplete, new building, 
with such facilities as could be quickly im- 
provised. A strict and almost military dis- 
ciplinarian, he was no less rigid in the stand- 
ards which he applied to himself. The re- 
spect and admiration in which he was held 
by his students ripened into affection as they 
came to see him at closer range, and recog- 
nized the bigness of heart and the warmth of 
friendship that lay, poorly concealed, by a cer- 
tain mantle of austerity. There were few 
graduates who failed to turn to him at some 
time for helpful counsel in the perplexities of 
later years, or who had failed to accept it, 
even though it ran counter to their own 
promptings. They had implicit confidence in 
his judgment, and knew that his advice sprang 
from genuine, almost paternal solicitude for 
their welfare, and that it was never given 
lightly. For some years before his death, he 
published, at his own expense, and sent 
monthly to every graduate of his department, 
a little pamphlet called the Connecting Rod, 
designed to give them information about the 
department and about each other, in a simple, 
unaffected way. Everything he did, for that 
matter, was done in a like manner, for none 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 900 
had a more wholesome contempt for the vani- 
ties, affectations or shallow pretenses of man. 
He possessed to a remarkable degree the 
faculty of perceiving clearly, and almost in- 
tuitively, the essential elements of a seem- 
ingly difficult problem or complex situation, 
and he was as quick in action as in percep- 
tion. Few excelled him in the clear discern- 
ment of the fallacies of an argument or in 
the directness of the challenge of such fal- 
lacies. Of a thoroughly progressive bent, he 
did not allow himself to be carried away by 
the educational fads and follies of the hour. 
The business of education was, to him, a 
serious business, with which liberties were 
not to be lightly taken. Although his talents 
were frequently brought into requisition in 
outer circles, his duties as a teacher were, to 
him, ever of paramount importance, on which 
he allowed no professional obligations of a 
busy lifetime to trench unduly. 
His university friends find it hard, indeed, 
to realize that his commanding figure has 
been seen upon the campus for the last time, 
and that in their councils his voice is stilled 
forever. None know better than they the 
sterling worth, the far-reaching significance of 
his performances in the service of the univer- 
sity, and especially of the department for 
which he had planned and labored so indefati- 
gably, with such wholehearted devotion, and 
on which he has left the enduring impress of 
his rare powers. 
THOMAS HARRISON MONTGOMERY ?* 
Tue University of Pennsylvania has suf- 
fered an irreparable loss in the death of Dr. 
Thomas Harrison Montgomery, Jr., Professor 
of Zoology, who has done so much to illumine 
his favorite science, and who has endeared 
himself to his colleagues, both in this and 
other universities, at home and abroad. 
Professor Montgomery was a son of the late 
Thomas Harrison Montgomery, for many 
years president of the American Fire Insur- 
ance Company of Philadelphia, who was a de- 
scendant of the Montgomerys of Eglinton, an 
1 Minute adopted by the faculties of the Univer- 
sity of Pennsylvania. 
