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trate the most difficult questions of the higher analysis. No one, 
with the exception perhaps of Arago, ever produced this effect in 
the same degree.” 
His lectures at the College de France were attended by the elite 
of French mathematicians, and doubtless did much to keep alive the 
ardent spirit of pure mathematical research which still lives among 
his countrymen. Among those who either were his pupils or were 
indebted to his encouragement and patronage may he reckoned Le 
Verrier, Hermite, Bertrand, Serret, Bour, Bonnet, Mannheim, all of 
whom are or have been pillars of French science. 
If we compare Liouville as an investigator with other great con- 
temporaries whose rolls of achievement like his own are already 
closed, we can scarcely put him in the highest rank of all, along 
with Abel and Jacobi, whose fortune it was in the course of their 
discoveries to open up new fields of research and create new branches 
of the analytic art. Nevertheless, so profound are some of his 
isolated contributions, and so elegant is all his mathematical writing, 
that it will be long before the traces of his handiwork vanish from 
the fabric of mathematical science ; and it seems certain that future 
generations will accord him all but the highest rank in the temple 
of mathematical fame. 
Robert Wilson. By Professor Fleeming Jenkin, F.B.SS. 
L. and E. 
Mr Robert Wilson was born in 1803 at Dunbar. In 1810 he 
lost his father, who was connected with the royal and mercantile 
navies. This brave man, after having twice reached the wreck of 
the “ Pallas ” frigate in the Dunbar life-boat, was drowned in the 
third attempt to reach the ship and rescue the remainder. 
Mr Robert Wilson was apprenticed to a joiner, and, like many 
other distinguished Scotchmen of the same generation, he owed his 
high standing as a mechanical engineer almost entirely to his natural 
genius, since he does not appear to have received any special ad- 
vantages in respect of education. 
During his apprenticeship, and at a date considerably prior to the 
successful introduction of the screw propeller into our navy, he 
