1879.] 



President's Address. 



409 



In the category of men of cultivation and leisure, "who hare turned 

 their attention with good purpose and success to scientific pursuits, we 

 may fairly reckon our late Fellow John Waterhouse, of Halifax. 



Sir Thomas Larcom was one of a long series of distinguished men who 

 have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society from the Corps of the 

 Royal Engineers. Travelling beyond the strict limits of his profes- 

 sional career, he endeavoured to give to his official work a wider range. 

 And it was due to suggestions emanating from him that the Irish 

 Survey was so extended as to make it the opportunity for collecting a 

 great variety of local information, history, language, and antiquities, 

 and that the map became the admiration of scientific travellers. 



Mr. Bennet Woodcroft's name will always be associated with the 

 foundation of that important department the Patent Office, with its 

 Library, and Museum, of which he was the first executive officer. 



Professor Kelland and Mr. Brooke were among our veterans in the 

 Society, and many of us will long recollect the lively interest in science 

 which the latter showed during his frequent attendance at our evening 

 meetings. 



In Mr. W. Froude, to whom one of the Royal Medals was awarded 

 in 1878, the Society, the public service of the country, and science in 

 general have sustained a loss which at one time would have been 

 irreparable, and which even now, when his work has become an 

 established science, is difficult to replace. 



Of Professor Clifford, and the gap which his death has caused 

 among our friends and the world of science at large, I know not how 

 to speak. His mathematical papers are being collected by a careful 

 and trusty hand, while his philosophical remains have been given to 

 us by one who knew and loved him as he deserved. To the same 

 friend we owe the memoir of his life, written indeed so far as that life 

 can ever be written, but reminding us also at every line that his life 

 was one the full story of which will always seem but half told. 



If in Professor Clifford we have lost one of our youngest, in Sir 

 J. Gr. Shaw-Lefevre we have lost one of the oldest of our mathematical 

 Fellows. Born before the present century, and Senior Wrangler at 

 Cambridge before many of us were in existence, he seems to belong to 

 a past age. But through a long and honourable course of unusually 

 varied and responsible public life he always retained his interest in 

 mathematics, and, himself no mean geometer of the old school, he had 

 in his later years projected and actually begun a new edition of the 

 w r orks of Archimedes. Of his labours in connexion with University 

 College, and afterwards with the University of London, all who are 

 interested in liberal education will retain an appreciative and grateful 

 memory. 



Our last loss, that of Professor Clerk Maxwell, has been in some 

 respects the greatest. In him the full maturity of a mind which had 

 VOL. xxix. 2 F 



