John Kelts Ingram. 



that capacity; and finally that in 1892, on the death of Bishop 

 Reeves, he was unanimously elected President, and filled the Chair 

 of the Academy until 1896. It should be added that it was in 

 virtue of his position as Senior Yice-President that, in the absence 

 through illness of the President, Sir Samuel Ferguson, it fell 

 to Ingram to preside at the festivities hold in 1886 on the memorable 

 occasion of the Academy's Centenary. 



The honourable and now lengthy roll of those distinguished men 

 who have adorned the office of President of this Academy contains 

 the name of none more qualified than Ingram to guide and stimulate 

 the activity of the Academy in the several provinces of learning 

 with which it is concerned. But varied as were his attainments, 

 encyclopaedic as was his knowledge, alike in its range and its 

 exactitude, his extreme fastidiousness in relation to his own work, 

 and his almost unexampled modesty, were scarcely less remarkable. 

 He was always much more ready to encourage the inquiries of others 

 than to exploit the results of his own. His chief intellectual passion 

 was a passion for facts, for order and for accuracy, for that definite 

 ascertainment of positive truth which it is not the least part of the 

 functions of this Academy to foster. Remarkable as was his critical 

 faculty, it was only when he felt satisfied that he was presenting 

 some absolutely fresh contribution to exact knowledge that he could 

 be induced to bring forward a paper. Thus the number of his 

 contributions to the Proceedings of the Academy — a list of which is 

 appended to this notice — was not great, regard being had to the 

 length and intimacy of his association with its work. As he himself 

 stated in the remarkable speech which he delivered in reply to the 

 toast of his health proposed by the Viceroy, Lord Aberdeen, on the 

 occasion of the Academy's Centenary, his intellectual activity lay for 

 the most part in other fields, and he was content that the main part 

 of his work for us here should be ministerial. A further reason for 

 the paucity of his communications may be found in the zest with 

 which he applied himself in middle life to the study of economic and 

 sociological questions, the region of inquiry in which the most enduring 

 results of Ingram's labours were achieved. He was an active member 

 of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, filling its 

 Presidential Chair in 1878-9; and he also took an active interest 

 in the work of such bodies as the Trades Union Congress of 1880. 



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