1911-12.] Obituary Notices. 485 
of the Committee may not perhaps have yet borne fruit in the establish- 
ment of an ideal system of military education ; but Chrystal’s services were 
recognised and appreciated by successive Secretaries of State. 
The foregoing paragraphs will serve to indicate in some degree how 
strenuous was Professor Chrystal’s life as investigator, as author and 
teacher, and as administrator, from his twenty-sixth to his fifty -ninth year. 
But in his holiday employments and recreations also he showed the same 
characteristic zeal and thoroughness. At Cambridge, as we have said, he 
was for some time a zealous volunteer and as good a shot as his myopic 
blue eyes permitted ; all his life he was a keen angler and for many years 
an energetic cyclist. He was deeply interested in both the science and the 
art of photography, in the pursuit of which he was indefatigable and most 
successful. In travel also he found great pleasure and refreshment. His 
first visit to the Continent was in 1874, when he studied for some months 
in Tubingen ; in the summer of 1876 he took a Cambridge reading party 
(which, as it happened, included Sir Martin Conway and Prof. F. 0. Bower, 
then undergraduates of Trinity) to Sterzing, Tyrol, and found a new 
recreation in mountaineering; in later life he frequently visited France, 
Germany, Norway, and Italy, and in 1892 he spent some weeks in the 
Western States of America. His “ literature,” to use the term in the 
eighteenth-century sense, was remarkably extensive, and was founded on 
a wide knowledge of the classics, for which, as we have said, he retained 
an early taste. He did not lose hold even of Greek, which in the case of 
men engrossed in other pursuits is apt to become rather a faint memory in 
middle life. German was the first modern foreign language which he 
mastered, and German books, especially poetry books, were long one of his 
favourite relaxations. He spoke German fluently, and had much of Heine 
by heart. In French he had read very widely after his predilections ; but 
in his maturity it was perhaps to Norse and Italian that he turned with 
the greatest enthusiasm. He professed to be a desultory reader and to 
have forgotten much, if not most, of what he had read, but, in Bacon’s 
phrase, he was both “ a full man ” and “ a ready man ” ; and, as might be 
expected in one of such wide and varied knowledge and experience, his 
talk was always interesting and informing; and this combined with his 
genial kindliness to make him a delightful host, guest, travelling ' com- 
panion, comrade, and friend. Amid all his many interests his home life 
was the greatest. Mrs Chrystal died in 1903, leaving a family of six sons 
and daughters to the care of a devoted father, who was also the most 
enthusiastic and the most intimate of their friends. 
It was towards the autumn of 1909 that Professor Chrystal’s friends 
