Popular Science Monthly/Volume 40/December 1891/Obituary Notes
Mr. William Terrell, an American meteorologist of world-wide reputation, died in Kansas City, Mo., September 18th, about seventy-four years old. He was graduated from Bethany College in 1844, became assistant in the American Ephemeries and Nautical Almanac in 1857, and held the place for ten years; was then appointed on the staff of the United States Coast Survey, when he invented the machine for predicting the maxima and minima of tides; was made assistant, with the rank of professor, in the Signal-Service Bureau in 1882; and retired from that position in 1886 to make his home in Kansas City. He published many works, large and small, of researches on the tides or pertaining to meteorological problems; a volume on Recent Advances in Meteorology (1888); a Popular Treatise on the Winds in 1889; and contributions to scientific journals and societies on such topics as thermal radiation, cyclones, tornadoes, and related subjects of terrestrial physics. His earliest scientific writings were contributed in 1856 to the Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the meteorological societies of England, Germany, and Austria.
Prof. Martin Duncan, F. R. S., whose death has been recently announced, was a special student of fossil corals and echinoderms, and published some valuable memoirs upon them. He was for a long time Professor of Geology in King's College, and there published an account of the Madreporia collected during the expedition of the Porcupine, a description of deep-sea and littoral corals from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and a revision of the Echnoidea. He also published many popular articles, including Corals and their Polyps, Studies among Amoebæ, Notes on the Ophiurans, or the Sand and Brittle Stars, and a book on the Sea-shore in the Natural History Rambles series of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
The death, by apoplexy, is announced of Dr. L. Just, Professor of Botany at the Polytechnicum, Carlsruhe, Director of the Botanic Garden there, and editor of the Botanischer Jahresbericht.
Dr. Francis Brunnow, an astronomer equally distinguished in America and Europe, has recently died in Heidelberg, Germany, in his sixty-seventh year. He was associated with Encke in Berlin, and there had a part in the discovery of Neptune. He investigated the motion of De Vice's comet of short period, which, however, has never been seen since. He also, at Berlin and Ann Arbor, Mich., where he became director of the observatory in 1854, calculated the theory of some of the minor planets. He published at Ann Arbor a periodical. Astronomical Notices, which is now very rare. His Lehrbuch der spherischen Astronomic has passed through several editions. He was appointed Professor of Astronomy in the University of Dublin and Director of the Dunsink Observatory in 1865. Retiring from those positions in 1874, he lived the rest of his life in private.
Dr. Barclay, who recently died in Simla, India, was a specialist in cryptogamic botany, and had acquired an extended reputation by his researches in the diseases of Indian plants. He was engaged at the time of his death with the commission for the investigation of leprosy.