Page:Heroes of the telegraph (IA cu31924031222494).djvu/144

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scientific advice, and the preparation of lectures or patent specifications. Later on, he hurried across the Park 'almost at racing speed,' to his offices at Westminster, where the business of the Landore-Siemens Steel Company and the Electrical Works of Messrs. Siemens Brothers and Company was transacted. As chairman of these large undertakings, and principal inventor of the processes and systems carried out by them, he had a hundred things to attend to in connection with them, visitors to see, and inquiries to answer. In the afternoon and evenings he was generally engaged at council meetings of the learned societies, or directory meetings of the companies in which he was interested. He was a man who took little or no leisure, and though he never appeared to over-exert himself, few men could have withstood the strain so long.

Siemens was buried on Monday, November 26, in Kensal Green Cemetery. The interment was preceded by a funeral service held in Westminster Abbey, and attended by representatives of the numerous learned societies of which he had been a conspicuous member, by many leading men in all branches of science, and also by a large body of other friends and admirers, who thus united in doing honour to his memory, and showing their sense of the loss which all classes had sustained by his death.

Siemens was above all things a 'labourer.' Unhasting, unresting labour was the rule of his life; and the only relaxation, not to say recreation, which he seems to have allowed himself was a change of task or the calls of sleep. This natural activity was partly due to the spur of his genius, and partly to his energetic spirit. For a man of his temperament science is always holding out new problems to solve and fresh promises of triumph. All he did only revealed more work to be done; and many a scheme lies buried in his grave.