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OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED. 



Sir George Airy was born on July 27, 1801, and died on January 

 2, 1892. It is not a possible task to compress into a few pages the 

 ninety years' work of a great man ; all that can be done is to indicate 

 a few of his many achievements. When his life is written it will be 

 a book and not a pamphlet, and only then shall we understand how 

 much of our scientific knowledge we owe to him. The number of 

 articles and memoirs which he has communicated to the various 

 Societies and journals in which he was interested are over five hundred 

 in number. The first of these is a paper read to the Cambridge 

 Philosophical Society, on November 25, 1822, on the use of silvered 

 glass for the mirrors of reflecting telescopes, and the last is his 

 Numerical Lunar. Theory. The date of the first paper is particularly 

 interesting, for it is the year before he took his degree. The last 

 paper is also remarkable, for, remembering that the theory of the 

 Moon is one to which some mathematicians have devoted nearly their 

 whole lives, it shows the old man attacking a laborious problem with 

 the energy of youth. 



Sir George was educated at private schools at Hereford and 

 Colchester. His vacations from school were spent at the Hill Farm, 

 near PI ay ford, with the uncle by whose assistance he was enabled to 

 go to Cambridge. He never appears to have played cricket, or foot- 

 ball, or rowed, but he delighted in pedestrianism. We are told that, 

 with a companion, he once attempted to walk from Playford to Bury 

 St. Edmunds and back in the same day. They reached Rushmere 

 Church on their way home, but could not do the last mile and a half, 

 and the journey had to be finished in a cart sent to meet them. 



In 1819 he entered Trinity College, as a sizar, but it does not 

 appear that he was elected a scholar until he was in his third year. 

 In 1823 he became Senior Wrangler and First Smith's Prizeman. The 

 writer can remember that when, thirty years after that date, he 

 entered Cambridge, the story was still told amongst the under- 

 graduates of how wonderfully Airy had answered in the examination. 

 Possibly nothing had been lost in the telling, but there must have 

 been some extraordinary excellence to have attracted such long con- 

 tinued attention. 



As soon as he had taken his degree be began a life of ceaseless 

 scientific activity. Memoirs followed each other with ever increasing 

 rapidity, each bearing evidence of much thought and of considerable 



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