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The Fellowship of the Royal Society was conferred upon him in 

 1853. After having served several times upon the Council, he in 1871 

 became Treasurer, a position which he held up to 1878, in November 

 of which year he succeeded to Sir J. Hooker as President. One more 

 fully qualified to occupy this important post it would be difficult to 

 find. To a manner in which sweetness and dignity were singularly 

 blended, he added an unfeigned interest in the work of others, in 

 whatever field it lay, and a rare quickness of appreciation of its 

 merits ; while his love of society and liberal hospitality had surrounded 

 him with a wide circle of distinguished friends both English and 

 foreign. 



Death overtook Mr. Spottiswoode while he was yet in the prime of 

 life and in the full vigour of his intellect. A serious tricycle accident 

 some months before had lowered his strength so that he was unable 

 to resist an attack of Roman fever, complicated by congestion of the 

 lungs ; and thus he passed away on the morning of June 27, 1883. 



His remains rest in Westminster Abbey. If further words are 

 needed to justify the claims of William Spottiswoode, President of the 

 Royal Society, to such an honour, none better or more eloquent could 

 be selected than those uttered over his scarcely closed grave by the 

 Dean of Westminster, words which supply that reference to the 

 beauty of his character, without which this brief sketch of him would 

 be indeed imperfect. " Those to whom his memory is dear need not 

 blush to think that he lies near those whose thoughts have enriched, 

 whose examples have guided, or whose lives have served mankind ; 

 that he rests there not as a thinker only, not as a student only, but as 

 a citizen of England, as a gifted worker in the fair domain of know- 

 ledge, as a busy worker in the manifold range of active life, and that 

 he carried into each sphere the same minute and careful and constant 

 and untiring industry, the same rare powers, the same high aim of 

 serving truth, of serving man, and of serving Grod. . . . He was 

 emphatically by nature and by choice a man of science. His own 

 special and more cherished studies lay in those high and abstract 

 regions which are traversed only by the few. He moved with ease, 

 we are told, on heights where others can scarcely draw their breath. 

 He did not devote himself to those great fields of knowledge, success 

 in which at once appeals to the imagination of us who stand outside 

 the circle of the true students of science. We can point to no marked 

 and tangible result of his labours such as comes at once to the mind 

 of the passing visitor, or may be brought home to the comprehension 

 of even the least instructed stranger, as he stands on the grave of a 

 Newton, or a Herschel, or a Lyell, or a Darwin. Yet he was, in the 

 truest sense of the words, a man of science. Devout in soul and 

 unperplexed in faith, he never, we are told, cared for one single 

 moment to speak of science in the sense implied in the often misused 



