512 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
The Society has this year to deplore the loss of one of the most 
eminent of its Honorary Members in the death of Mr Talbot. It 
is very rare indeed to find a man who attains to anything beyond 
mediocrity in more than one or two departments of knowledge. Mr 
Talbot is a remarkable exception to the general rule. Seldom has 
the world seen so many-sided a man. He attained to distinction in 
pure mathematics, in physics, in chemistry, in astronomy, in archae- 
ology, and in literature; nor is his name altogether absent from the 
records of botanical research. After studying at Harrow, Mr Talbot 
graduated in Cambridge in 1821 ; and although his name appears 
on the honour list in mathematics, it does not occupy so high a 
position as his subsequent career would have warranted us in ex- 
pecting. In fact, his early promise was eminence in classical litera- 
ture, especially in Greek. As an undergraduate he obtained the 
Porson prize for translation into Greek verse of a selected passage 
from an English dramatic poet. This was followed at his gradua- 
tion by his obtaining one of the two Chancellor’s medals, awarded 
“ to the graduates who show themselves the greatest proficients in 
classical learning.” Linguistic studies, though he never abandoned 
them, had not that prominence in his after life which might have 
been expected from this beginning. The year after taking his 
degree we find him contributing to “Gergonne’s Annales” a paper 
on a mathematical subject, which was followed up by others in the 
same serial ; and from that time, for upwards of fifty years, there 
emanated from him an uninterrupted stream of original papers on 
mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and archaeology, as 
valuable as they were varied. To take even a hasty glance at his 
most important researches would vastly exceed the limits of this 
necessarily brief sketch. We must not, however, pass by without 
a few words his great discovery in photography. So early as 1826 
he had turned his attention to the chemical action of light. The 
results were communicated to the “ Edinburgh Journal of Science ” 
and other periodicals. In 1833, when sketching on the shores of 
Lake Como, he availed himself of the camera lucida , and it oc- 
curred to him that images might be fixed on the paper by chemical 
action. The idea was not altogether novel, but it had not as yet 
led to any definite result. On Mr Talbot’s return to England, he 
commenced a series of experiments on the decomposition of nitrate 
