OBITUARY NOTICES. 433 
OBITUARY NOTICES. 
ROBERT WERE FOX, F.R.S. 
In the late Robert Were Fox, F.r.s., the Institution has lost one of 
its oldest and most esteemed honorary members, a man who for 
more than three-score years had been devoted to scientific research, 
and who had pioneered the way in some of the most difficult and 
abstruse enquiries connected with electricity and mineralogy, and 
other practical and experimental sciences. 
Born on the 26th of April, 1789, at Falmouth, he continued to 
reside there, or in its neighbourhood, until his death, in his eighty- 
ninth year, in June, 1877. He was educated at home in the classics 
and mathematics, and in some foreign languages. Excluded at that 
time from the Universities, where, too, physical science was then 
much neglected, his advance in it would have been slow if he had 
not had in the varied scenes around him, on the ocean and land, and 
in the depths of both, ever fresh objects for enquiry, and for ex- 
perimental researches on the cosmic forces—gravitation, light, heat, 
electricity, magnetism, and chemistry. He seems to have owed his 
first impulse in a scientific direction to his mother, who directed 
his attention to the investigation of the properties of steam. One 
of the earliest subjects of his enquiry was therefore the important 
point of the limit of the advantages of high-pressure steam. In 
company with Mr. Joel Lean, he made a series of costly experiments, 
so early as 1812, which proved that the advantage of high-pressure 
steam was mechanical rather than chemical, the heat and water 
contained in a given ratio of steam increasing nearly in the ratio of 
its elasticity ; and in the same year, in conjunction with Mr. Lean, 
he took out a patent for improvements in steam engines. Three 
years later he commenced the enquiry which was to establish his 
reputation throughout Europe ; and which was to bring up evidence 
de profundis, ‘that mother earth retained in her bosom warmth 
more genial than volcanic fire, and an electro-magnetic vis insita, 
which plays amidst the strata, and amidst the flashes of the aurora, 
and is doubtless connected with the crystallization and arrangement 
of her minerals.” 
