Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. 1860—1906. 
49 
was to be brought solved for him on Tuesday. On Tuesday I found him in bed, with 
what appeared to be an attack of influenza. He had expressed himself tired after 
his ride on Sunday, an almost uni(|ue admission. But on Monday he went a long 
walk over the Downs, getting home late. He came down to breakfast on Tuesday 
but had to return to bed. In the afternoon when I came he insisted on smoking 
and wanted the solution of the problem, saying he was better. I begged him, as 
one still closer did, to stay in bed on the morrow and give up a projected journey 
to Town. But there was a dentist to be seen, preparations for a visit to the 
M.B.A. Laboratory at Lowestoft to be made, and a wonderful picture-gallery to be 
visited to free him from the atmosphere of the Studbooks. His will was indomi- 
table ; he went up to Town and went to the pictures on Wednesday, he went to 
the dentist on Thursday, but from the dentist's chair he had to be taken to 
a doctoi-'s, and thence to a nursing home. The summoning telegram reached his 
wife on the same afternoon, and he died of pneumonia on Good Friday, April 13. 
So passed away, shall I say not unfitly — for it was without any long disabling 
illness and in full intellectual vigour — a man of unusvial personality, one of the 
most inspiring and loveable of teachers, the least self-regard ing and the most 
helpful of friends, and the most generous of opponents. 
As for his life, I think it was to him what he would have wished it. There 
were moments of discouragement and depression, he felt occasionally a want of 
sympathy for his life-work in some of his former colleagues, and while he was born 
to be the centre of an enthusiastic school, he found at times somewhat scanty 
material for its maintenance in pleasure-loving Oxford. But every stone he lifted 
from the way became gold in his hands ; each problem he touched became a joy 
which absorbed his whole being. The artist in his nature was so intense that he 
found keen pleasure in most men and in all things. Only meanness or superficiality 
fired him, and then, considering how the world is built, sometimes to almost an 
excess of wrath. But he had no personal hate ; he could make the graceful 
amend, and had he ever a foe, that foe, I veritably believe, could have won 
Weldon's heart in the smoking of a cigarette. 
If we pass from himself to those whose fortune brought them in close contact 
with him — to his friends and pupils — their loss can only be outlined, it is too 
intimate and personal for full expression. There was a transition from respect to 
reverence, a growth from affection to love ; to such a tenderness as some bear for a 
more delicate spiritual nature, to even such feeling as the Sikh is reputed to 
hold for the white man's child in his charge. 
And lastly as to science, what will his place be ? The time to judge is not 
yet. Much of his work has still to be published, and this is not the occasion to 
indicate what biometry has already achieved. The movement he aided in starting 
is but in its infancy. It has to fight not for this theory or that, but for a new method 
and a greater standard of logical exactness in the science of life. To those who 
condemn it out of hand, or emphasise its slightest slip, we can boldly reply, 
You simply cannot judge, for you have not the requisite knowledge. To the 
Biometrika v 7 
