1911-12.] 
Obituary Notices. 
477 
Professor George Chrystal, M.A., LL.D. By Dr J. Sutherland 
Black and Professor C. G. Knott. 
(Read January 6, 1913.) 
Part I. — Life and Career. By Dr J. S. Black. 
George Chrystal was born on the 8th of March 1851, at Mill of 
Kingoodie, in the parish of Bonrtie, some thirteen miles to the north-west 
of the city of Aberdeen. His father, William Chrystal of Gateside, who 
achieved some success both in agriculture and in commerce, is described 
as having been a man who made his way, without any initial advantages, 
by sheer force of character and the exercise of great natural ability and 
originality. His son, the subject of this memoir, received his early education 
at the parish school of Old Meldrum, some two miles distant from his home. 
From an early age he gave marked promise of intellectual distinction, 
though physically he was far from strong, and was hampered by a 
lameness which he afterwards outgrew, but which precluded him from 
joining in some of the more boisterous activities of boyhood. Early in 
the ’sixties the family removed to Aberdeen, where in 1863 he entered 
the Grammar School. Of this period few memorials survive, beyond a 
number of medals which show that he maintained the early promise 
of his childhood. In 1866 he gained the Williamson Scholarship, and 
in 1867 he passed, in his seventeenth year, into the University. Among 
his teachers here, he was accustomed to refer to Bain as having perhaps 
had the greatest influence on his whole intellectual development. But he 
also acknowledged his deep indebtedness to Geddes, Fuller, Nicol, Thomson, 
and others, of whom some account, inspired by himself, will be found in 
the recently published Life of his elder contemporary, William Robertson 
Smith, who had graduated with the highest distinction in 1866, and whose 
brilliant career is known to have been a pattern and an incentive to so 
many of the ablest men of the younger generation. Chrystal, who was 
the friend and contemporary at Aberdeen of Sir William M. Ramsay, 
seems at first to have been much attracted to classical scholarship, and his 
interest in the Literse Humaniores continued strong and keen to the end 
of his life ; but ultimately the study of the mathematical sciences became 
the absorbing pursuit of his academic years. In this he undoubtedly was 
following the natural bent of his genius ; and a happy determining 
