650 WILLIAM BOWER TAYLOR. 



committee of the society, which position he held until his death, giving 

 to every detail of business the same attention he did to solving the 

 greatest problem of nature. 



To the Journal of the Franklin Institute, of which society he was 

 long a member, he contributed, in 1876, a paper on " Physics of the 

 ether," consisting principally of a review of a work by S. Tolver 

 Preston, of London, as well as numerous brief notices or reviews. In 

 the American.Journal of Science and Art, New Haven, he published a 

 paper in 1876 on "Recent researches in sound," and in 1885 "On the 

 crumpling of the earth's crust." 



His "Kinetic theories of gravitation" was published by the Smith- 

 sonian Institution in 1876. An editorial in the American Journal of 

 Science refers to this work as "a valuable historical resume of the 

 various attempts that have been made by the most eminent philosophers 

 to account for the phenomena of gravitative attraction from the time 

 of Newton to the present day, concluded by a vigorous criticism of the 

 leading theories, in which the author, passing over the consideration 

 of the statical method of explaining gravitation by pressure, finds 

 that kinetic systems are essentially of two classes — the hypothesis of 

 emissions or corpuscles, and the hypothesis of fluid undulations — and 

 proceeds to show that neither form of either hypothesis can satisfy 

 the two Newtonian conditions of a scientific theory — verity and suffi- 

 ciency." 



He became a member of the American Philosophical Society of Phil- 

 adelphia on the 19th of October, 1877, but does not appear to have 

 contributed to its Transactions. 



He was elected a member of the American Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science at its twenty-eighth annual meeting, in August, 

 1880, and at the meeting of August, 1881, was made a fellow of that 

 society. The only paper he contributed to the Proceedings of this 

 society was on "A probable cause of the shrinkage of the earth's 

 crust." 



On leaving the Patent Office, he was engaged by Professor Henry to 

 edit his researches on "sound" and "illuminating materials," for the 

 reports of the Light House Board, and in 1878 was appointed by Henry 

 as an assistant in the Smithsonian Institution, a position which he con- 

 tinued to hold for seventeen years, until his death. 



On the death of Prof. Spencer P. Baird, secretary of the Smithso- 

 nian Institution and United States Commissioner of Fisheries, August 

 19, 1887, the Washington Philosophical Society, as the senior of the 

 Washington scientitic societies, and the one with which Professor Baird 

 had been most closely connected, took initial steps in arranging for a 

 joint meeting to commemorate his life and services. To Mr. Taylor 

 was assigned the theme of "Professor Baird as an administrator," and 

 on account of an intimate knowledge of his great work in the Smith- 

 sonian he was eminently fitted to discharge the duty assigned him. 



