Sir William Grove presented the rare spectacle of steady and distinguished devotion to science in spite of the claims of an exacting profession. Grove was an eminent lawyer. Called to the bar in 1835, he was for some time kept from active work by ill health; but he subsequently acquired a considerable practice, and becoming a Queen’s Counsel in 1853, was for some years the leader of the South Wales Circuit. His practice was mainly in patent cases, and the reputation he obtained in that field led to his being appointed a member of the Royal Commission on the Patent Laws. His work as an advocate was, however, by no means confined to such matters ; he was one of the counsel—Serjeant Shee and Dr. Kenealy being the others—who defended the Rugeley poisoner, William Palmer, and he was engaged in many other causes celebres. The eminent position to which he had risen at the bar led to his appointment in November, 1871, as a Judge of the old Court of Common Pleas, a post which in 1875 was converted by the Judicature Act into that of a Judge of the High Court. This office he held until his retirement in 1887, when he became a member of the Privy Council.
Throughout the greater part of his long and distinguished legal career, Grove’s love of science impelled him to devote a large share of his energies to its pursuit. It is remarkable that his first paper, which was communicated to the British Association in 1839, and which also appealed in the ‘Comptes Rendus,’ and in Poggendorff’s ‘Annalen,’ contained a description of the “Grove’s cell,” which was afterwards used in every physical laboratory in the world. This was succeeded by a long series of memoirs, chiefly on electrical subjects, among which one of the best known is that on the gas battery. In 1842 he delivered, at the London Institution, an address which was, in the following year, developed into the celebrated series of lectures: “On the Correlation of Physical Forces.” In these he discussed what we should now call the transformations of energy; and, though Professor Tait, in his “Historical Sketch of the Science of Energy,”[1] assigns precedence in calling “ attention to the generality of such transformations ” to Mrs. Somerville, there can be no doubt that Grove was an independent and very advanced thinker on that subject.
For many years Sir William Grove took a very prominent part in the affairs of the Royal Society, and was one of the most active promoters of the reform of its constitution, which took place in 1847. It is largely to his efforts that we owe our present system of electing only a specified number of Fellows in each year. He was also one of the founders of the “Philosophical Club.”
He was President of the British Association in 1866, and, in the
- ↑ ‘ Thermodynamics,’ p. 58.
