238 Annual Report of the Council. 



Thomas Penyngton Kirkman, son of John Kirkman, 

 a cotton dealer in Bolton, Lancashire, was born on the 31st 

 March, 1806. The only education he received at other 

 hands than his own was that which the Bolton Grammar 

 School could give, after leaving which he earned, by 

 tuition, the cost of graduating at Dublin University, and, 

 afterwards, accepted a private tutorship in the family of an 

 Irish Baronet. Taking orders on his return to England, 

 he served curacies, first, at Bury, under the Rev. Geoffrey 

 Hornby, and, later, at Lymm, after which, in 1840 (to use 

 his own version), he was enticed by fair words, by the then 

 rector of Winwick, to bury himself for life as rector 

 of the newly-formed Parish of Southworth with Croft, 

 where he remained for 52 years. Here, by perseverance 

 and his gift of teaching, he formed, out of the roughest 

 material, a parish choir of boys and girls who could sing, at 

 sight, any four-part song set before them. Here also, 

 with an expenditure of mental labour that only the finest of 

 physical constitutions could have sustained, he devoted, 

 practically, the whole of his time (for the parochial work 

 was small) to the study of pure mathematics, the higher 

 criticism of the Old Testament, and questions of first 

 principles. 



His mathematical papers include original work on Com- 

 binations, Partitions, the Theory of the Polyedra and the 

 Theory of Groups, and are to be found in the Philosophical 

 Transactions of the Royal Society and the Proceedings of 

 the Literary and PhilosopJiical Society of Liverpool (of 

 which he was an honorary member) and the publications of 

 this Society, of which he had been an honorary member 

 since 1852. In 1857 Mr. Kirkman was elected a fellow of 

 the Royal Society, and later became a foreign member of 

 the Dutch Society of Sciences at Haarlem. His researches 

 pierced the highest region of pure mathematics along paths 

 severe and difficult traversed by few of his contemporaries, 



