184 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 
[Sess. 
Edward William Prevost, Ph.D., F.I.C. By Dr Henry Barnes, 
O.B.E., M.D. 
(Read January 9, 1922.) 
By the death of Dr Prevost, which took place at his residence, The Sandi- 
way, Ross-on-Wye, on 7th October 1920, the Society loses one of its oldest 
Fellows and one keenly interested in its welfare. 
Dr Prevost was born at Carlisle in 1851, being the elder son of Colonel 
T. W. Prevost, at that time Staff Officer of Pensions in the district. His 
early education was under private tutors and at Glenalmond, which school 
he left in 1864 for Rugby, where he remained till 1867. After two years 
on the science side at Edinburgh University he proceeded to Leipzig and 
Heidelberg, where he studied chemistry under Bunsen and graduated Ph.D. 
Returning to England, he worked for two and a half years at the Royal 
College of Science and Art, South Kensington, undertaking chemical 
research for Norman Lockyer. For several years he was a tutor in 
chemistry at Oxford, where he was employed under Odling as teacher of 
quantitative chemistry. He carried out in Oxford an investigation into 
the nutritive value of the turnip grown in (a) unmanured, ( b ) manured, 
soil. From May 1879 to the spring of 1881 he was Professor of Chemistry 
at the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester. On leaving in 1881 he 
retired into private life and took up farming, first at Elsmere, near Tam- 
worth, and afterwards at Elton, Newnham, where in 1890 the first part 
of the Cumberland Dialect Glossary was written. In 1882 he received the 
Gold Medal of the Royal Highland Agricultural Society for a paper on 
the cultivation of potatoes. In 1878 he obtained the Fellowship of the 
Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland. While living at 
Newnham he joined the Gloucester Garrison Volunteers, afterwards attain- 
ing the rank of major. He became a Fellow of the Society in 1875, one 
of the proposers being Professor Piazzi Smyth, then Astronomer Royal for 
Scotland, and a paper by him on “ An Ammonium-Cupric Zinc Chloride ” 
appears in our Proceedings, vol. ix, 5th February 1877. It is the analysis 
of the substance which grows on the brass binding screws and carbon of a 
Leclanche cell. 
It is, however, by his Glossary of the dialect of Cumberland that 
Dr Prevost will be best remembered. He began his study of this subject 
nearly thirty years ago, taking for groundwork the Glossary formed by 
the late Mr William Dickinson of Workington, published by the English 
Dialect Society (1878-81). The first results of his labours, in which he 
received assistance from many correspondents throughout the country, was 
