OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED. 



William John Macquokn Rankike was born at Edinburgh on the 

 5th July, 1820. He was the son of David Ran Trine (a lieutenant in the 

 Rifle Brigade, and a younger son of Macquorn Rankine, of Drumdow, of 

 a well-known family in the county of Ayr), and of Barbara Grahame, one 

 of the daughters of Archibald Grahame, of Dalmarnock, a banker in 

 Glasgow. He was educated partly at Ayr Academy, partly at the High 

 School of Glasgow, from which he went to the University of Edinburgh ; 

 but he derived much of his instruction from his father, and, like most 

 men who have made any real mark in science, he owed the greater part 

 of his knowledge to his own energy and industry. In 1836 he received 

 a gold medal for an essay on the Undulatory Theory of Light, and in 

 1838 he gained an extra prize for his essay on Methods of Physical 

 Investigation. Shortly after this date he entered upon the profession of 

 Civil Engineering, as a pupil of Sir John McNeill, under whose direction 

 he was employed from 1839 to 1841 in various schemes for waterworks 

 and harbour-works in the north of Ireland, and on the Dublin and 

 Drogheda Railway. At this time he invented a method of setting out 

 curves which still bears his name. From 1844 to 1848 he was employed, 

 under Locke and Errington, on the construction of the Clydesdale 

 Junction Railway, and subsequently upon various schemes promoted by 

 the Caledonian Railway. In 1845-46 he was engineer of the proposed 

 Edinburgh and Leith waterworks, a scheme which was defeated by the 

 rival Edinburgh Water Company. In 1852, he and the late John 

 Thompson were joint engineers of the well-known works by which 

 Glasgow is supplied with pure water from Loch Katrine. In November 

 of 1855 he was appointed Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and 

 Mechanics in the University of Glasgow : he retained this chair until 

 his death, which occurred on the 24th December, 1872. 



It is difficult to determine whether Rankine takes his highest place as 

 an original investigator, or in respect of his great suceess in digesting 

 the scientific knowledge of himself and his contemporaries into a form 

 available for common use. His works have the very rare merit of being 

 thorough, both in a scientific and in a practical sense. With great 

 originality of treatment, and frequently of research, his text-books 

 exhaust the useful theory of his subjects, and his results are always 

 reduced to a form in which they can be actually used. His practice as 

 an engineer had made him fully alive to the important difference between 

 the crude results of theoretical reasoning from principles and the 

 reduced formulae adapted to the data obtainable from observation or 

 specification. There is probably no scientific writer to be compared with 

 him in the three aspects of the extent covered by his treatises — their 

 scientific accuracy and exhaustiveness and their immediate adaptation to 

 the use of practical men, who may be utterly unable to follow the 

 reasoning by which he arrived at his formulae. There are persons who 

 think that the path-finder in science is of a higher and rarer order of 



vol. xxi. & 



