Popular Science Monthly/Volume 43/October 1893/Obituary Notes

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search

OBITUARY NOTES.

The Rev. Charles Pritchard, D. D., Savilian Professor of Astronomy in the University of Oxford, whose death was recently announced, was in his earlier life a teacher in the English upper middle-class schools, in which he distinguished himself by his efforts to exhibit an improved method of education. After thirty years of this occupation, he retired to become an active clergyman, but in 1870 was offered and accepted the professorship at Oxford. Here he secured the establishment of the university observatory; applied photography, before the gelatin plate came into use, to the moon and other bright objects; devised and used a method of investigating the magnitude of the brighter stars through a process of extinction by means of a wedge of neutralized glass; visited Egypt to determine the amount of atmospheric absorption; studied the mutual proper motions of the stars of the Pleiades; and began the investigation of the parallax of stars of the second magnitude.

The death, on August 16th, is announced of M. Jean Martin Charcot, of the Salpêtrière, Paris, the eminent specialist in diseases of the nervous system. He was most distinguished for his researches in the field of insanity, hysteria, hypnotism, and of all those nervous phenomena which have been associated by many with magnetic influences.