PROCEEDINGS 
OF THE 
ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH. 
YOL. XXXIV. 
1913-14. 
Presentation of Bust of Lord Kelvin. 
The General Statutory Meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh was 
held in 24 George Street on Monday, 27th October 1913, at 4.30 p.m. 
Principal Sir William Turner, K.C.B., President, in the chair. 
Before the transaction of the usual business, the bust of Lord Kelvin 
(see frontispiece), which had been gifted to the Royal Society of Edinburgh 
by Lady Kelvin, was presented by Professor Crum Brown, acting for Lady 
Kelvin, and received by the President for the Society. 
Professor Crum Brown said : — 
“ Mr President, Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 
Ladies and Gentlemen, — Lady Kelvin, knowing the great interest Lord 
Kelvin always took in the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and knowing also 
the high admiration and warm affection of the Fellows of the Society for 
their late President, has, with thoughtful kindness, expressed the wish to 
give this beautiful bust, by Mr Shannan, to remain in the rooms of the 
Society as a permanent memorial, and has asked me to present it in her 
name. I feel very highly honoured by Lady Kelvin’s request. I have had 
the great privilege of intimate acquaintance with Lord Kelvin since my 
boyhood, and it is impossible for me to tell how much I owe to him. 
“ I shall not attempt a review of Lord Kelvin’s work or character, but I 
may remind you of his supreme love of truth and of his intense interest in 
everything, however apparently trivial, connected with the constitution or 
with the working of the physical universe. These were the prime motives 
to his work, and he carried it out in the same spirit. Having formulated a 
problem, he followed the straightest road to its solution. Of course he 
encountered difficulties : these he did not evade, he surmounted them. To 
do so he had often to invent and construct special instruments of wholly 
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