1911-12.] Obituary Notices. 479 
Aberdeen are worth quoting here. Speaking of Aberdeen, he says : “ The 
work in all the ordinary classes was very elementary. The course was 
the same for everyone, viz. the old seven subjects, plus a course of natural 
history, which included both zoology and a little geology. Yet there was 
a great variety, and if we did not get much of any one thing, all that we 
got was highly digestible, and men who went conscientiously through that 
course carried with them in after-life, for the most part, an intellectual 
mark that was unmistakable.” “ When I went to the University of 
Cambridge ... I found that the course there for the ordinary degree 
in Arts was greatly inferior in educational quality to the Scottish one. 
On the other hand, the courses in Honours were on a very much higher 
standard, although they suffered greatly from the chaotic organisation 
of the English universities.” He goes on to say : “ I have frequently 
been tempted to think that the three years I spent as an under- 
graduate at Cambridge were wasted years of my life : if they were to be 
valued merely by the amount of new knowledge acquired, they were 
largely wasted ; but, on the other hand, they were of great advantage to 
me in other respects. I made the acquaintance of a large number of the 
ablest young men of my generation ; and it was no small matter to come 
even within view of such men as Cayley, Adams, Stokes, and Maxwell, and 
to have lived for a time within the College walls which had sheltered Tait 
and Kelvin. Cambridge at that time presented strange contrasts. Although 
almost decadent as an educational institution, it numbered among its 
members, as the names I have just quoted prove, perhaps the greatest 
galaxy of intellectual stars that ever illustrated any period of the history 
of a university.” 
Shortly after his graduation in 1875, Chrystal was elected Fellow and 
Lecturer of Corpus Christi College, with which society he retained a life- 
long connection, having been subsequently chosen an Honorary F ellow. For 
some two years he lectured in mathematics and physics to the students 
of a group of colleges which included both Corpus and Peterhouse ; in 
this period of his life, besides his activity and success as a teacher, a 
noteworthy feature was the part he took in promoting certain measures 
of University and College reform. It was during these years, too, that he 
carried out his important work in connection with the experimental 
verification of Ohm’s law, and began the article “ Electricity ” for the 
ninth edition of the JEncyclopcedia Britannica, which will be dealt with 
more fully in another part of this notice. - 
In the summer of 1877 a vacancy occurred in the chair of Mathematics 
in the University of St Andrews, and Chrystal made application for the 
