Popular Science Monthly/Volume 46/April 1895/Obituary Notes
The Marquis Louis Charles Joseph Gaston de la Saporta, the eminent fossil botanist, and author of many brilliant books on his specialty, died suddenly at Aix, France, in the last week in January. He was born at Saint Zacherie in 1825; was nominated correspondent of the Institute of France in 1876. In his special field he was one of the most industrious students and eminent authorities of the day. Between his first book, on the flora of the Quaternary period, in 1876, and his Paleontological Origin of Cultivated Trees, in 1888, he published at least twenty volumes containing important facts and new discoveries. His last work was on the fossil flora of Portugal. "No one," says M. Albert Gaudry, himself an eminent paleontologist, "has cast so clear light on the history of the formation and successive developments of the vegetable world." The Monthly has been often enriched with translations of his brilliant and suggestive essays.
Prof. Arthur Cayley, the greatest English mathematician, and one of the most eminent mathematicians of any country or time, died in Cambridge, England, January 26th. He was born in Richmond, England, in 1821, and showed a great aptitude and liking at an early age for arithmetical calculations—although it was said of him in later years that he could not count the change for a shilling. He was educated at Cambridge, where he excelled all in mathematics, coming out as senior wrangler and first prize man in 1842; practiced at the bar for several years, without losing his taste or ceasing his devotion to mathematics; and was appointed to the newly instituted Sadlerian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge, in 1863, after he had already contributed about three hundred papers to the Royal Society. As a mathematician he is perhaps most famous as the discoverer of the Theory of Invariants, which, according to Prof. Salmon, has given a new aspect to several departments of the science. The Royal Society's list contains the titles of seven hundred and twenty-four papers and memoirs by Cayley, down to 1883, while the number now would probably be about eight hundred. Prof. Cayley was active and efficient in many other spheres than that of mathematics. He was an early member of the Alpine Club. He was familiar with many European languges. He delivered a course of lectures at Johns Hopkins University in the winter of 1882-'83. He was President of the British Association at Southport in 1883. He received the Royal and the Copley medals of the Royal Society, was an officer of the French Legion of Honor, and was an honorary member of many learned societies at home and abroad. His mathematical papers are in course of publication in a series of ten quarto volumes, of which seven have appeared.