xxxviii Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



had made, and adopted the inverted point support, arnd it is a great satisfac- 

 tion to me to have been of some use in this improvement. 



Many of Keith Lucas' friends heard, vs^ith regret, that he was learning to fly. 

 In addition to their personal affection they felt the possible loss to science 

 ovFing to the risk he was running ; they also thought that the advances he 

 was making in aeronautics were so important that no chance of interruption 

 by an accident should be taken. Bxit it was questionable whether the risk 

 was increased. Before he learnt to fly he had been in very many flights 

 on an aeroplane as a passenger when he was experimenting with various 

 instruments, and for this work it was essential that he should be a passenger. 

 When flying as a passenger an accident might happen through want of skill 

 of the pilot ; when he was a pilot his own want of skill might cause an 

 accident, but those that knew him felt sure that when he had once learnt 

 to fly, he would have far more than the average skill in manipulation of an 

 aeroplane, requiring as it does a clear cool judgment and rapid co-ordination 

 of muscles and brain. He thought he could do his work better by becoming 

 a pilot, and improve the technical part of the branch of the service to which 

 be belonged, and he was right. 



Flying as a passenger gave him great pleasure, even on the first occasion. 

 But the pleasure in his first flight alone — his instructor left behind — was far 

 greater still, and he met his death swiftly and suddenly in the open air doing 

 the work he loved. He was buried in the Military Cemetery at Aldershot. 



Horace Darwin. 



Part II. 



Although the physiology of muscle and nerve, and the nature of the 

 excitatory process which passes along such tissues in the form of a wave 

 from a stimulated point, had been subjected to investigation by a large 

 number of workers, it is remarkable how little advance had been made since 

 the time of Helmholtz and Du Bois-Eeymond. An occasional fact of 

 importance was discovered from time to time, but it was not until Keith 

 Lucas commenced his systematic study of the process in 1903 that any rapid 

 progress took place. In his first paper, which was devoted to the question of 

 the effect of tension on the duration of muscular contraction, we find from 

 the outset how great a part the design of appropriate and accurate 

 instrumental aid was to play in the elucidation of the various problems 

 attacked. It was by the elimination of the inertia of recording levers by the 

 use of a photographic method that it was shown that increase of tension, 

 within limits, results in a lengthening of the period of contraction. This 

 fact, at a later date, was destined to play an important part in the theory of 

 muscular contraction. 



Gotch had already obtained results which indicated that the different 

 degrees of contraction which a muscle is able to exert were due to the 

 varying number of individual fibres at work, and not to the capacity of each 

 fibre to contract otherwise than to the maximal extent within its power at the 



