nd astronomy
stood in the first rank, and who for his noble character was
respected and beloved by all his colleagues in the International
Geodetic Association.

Sir Joseph Larmor writes: {186}

Sir George Darwin's last public appearance was as president of the
fifth International Congress of Mathematicians, which met at
Cambridge on August 22-28, 1912. The time for England to receive the
congress having obviously arrived, a movement was initiated at
Cambridge, with the concurrence of Oxford mathematicians, to send an
invitation to the fourth congress held at Rome in 1908. The proposal
was cordially accepted, and Sir George Darwin, as _doyen_ of the
mathematical school at Cambridge, became chairman of the organising
committee, and was subsequently elected by the congress to be their
president. Though obviously unwell during part of the meeting, he
managed to discharge the delicate duties of the chair with
conspicuous success, and guided with great verve the deliberations of
the final assembly of what turned out to be a most successful meeting
of that important body.

Personal Characteristics.

His daughter, Madame Raverat, writes:

I think most people might not realise that the sense of adventure and
romance was the most important thing in my father's life, except his
love of work. He thought about all life romantically, and his own
life in particular; one could feel it in the quality of everything he
said about himself. Everything in the world was interesting and
wonderful to him, and he had the power of making other people feel
it.

He had a passion for going everywhere and seeing everything; learning
every language, knowing the technicalities of every trade; and all
this emphatically _not_ from the scientific or collector's point of
view, but from a deep sense of the romance and interest of
everything. It was splendid to travel with him; he always learned as
much as possible of the language, and talked to everyone; we had to
see simply everything there was to be seen, and it was all
interesting, like an adventure. For instance, at Vienna I remember
being taken to a most improper music hall, and at Schonbrunn hearing
from an old forester the whole secret history of the old Emperor's
son. My father would tell us the stories of the places we went to
with an