y. I passed a very
pleasant evening with him at the Smithsonian Institution, engaged
in a discussion, some points of which he afterwards mentioned in
an address to the British Association. Among other matters, I
mentioned this law, originating with Mr. J. Homer Lane. He did not
think it could be well founded, and when I attempted to reproduce
Mr. Lane's verbal demonstration, I found myself unable to do so.
I told him I felt quite sure about the matter, and would write to
him on the subject. When I again met Mr. Lane, I told him of my
difficulty and asked him to repeat the demonstration. He did so
at once, and I sent it off to Sir William. The latter immediately
accepted the result, and published a paper on the subject, in which
the theorem was made public for the first time.

It is very singular that a man of such acuteness never achieved
anything else of significance. He was at my station on one occasion
when a total eclipse of the sun was to be observed, and made a report
on what he saw. At the same time he called my attention to a slight
source of error with which photographs of the transit of Venus might
be affected. The idea was a very ingenious one, and was published
in due course.

Altogether, the picture of his life and death remains in my memory
as a sad one, the brightest gleam being the fact that he was elected
a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which must have been
to him a very grateful recognition of his work on the part of his
scientific associates. When he died, his funeral was attended only
by a few of his fellow members of the academy. Altogether, I feel
it eminently appropriate that his name should be perpetuated by the
theorem of which I have spoken.

If the National Academy of Sciences has not proved as influential a
body as such an academy should, it has still taken such a place in
science, and rendered services of such importance to the government,
that the circumstances connected with its origin are of permanent
historic interest. As the writer was not a charter member, he cannot
claim to have been "in at the birth," though he became, from time to
time, a repository of desultory information on the subject. There is
abundant internal and circumstantial evidence that Dr. B. A. Gould,
although his name has, so far as I am aware, never been mentioned
in this connection, was a leading spirit in the first organization.
On the other hand, curiously enough, Professor Henry w