PERSONAL NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3102, 27 August 1913, Page 77

PERSONAL NOTES.

The first lectureship in fossil botany in Britain lias been established at London University with Dr Marie C. Stopes, Fellow of University College, as lecturer. Dr Stopes was the first woman appointed to the scientific staff of Manchester University. The Royal Society sent her to Japan in 1907, where, investigating coal mines, she carried out real exploration work in parts never before visited by . any European. Among Df Stopes’s published books are "Ancient Plants.”

■—Mrs Norman Kemp, who has just received the D.Sy. degree from Edinburgh University, is the first lady so honoured. She graduated in Arte in 1907. Entering the Faculty of Science, ahe studied chemistry and geology, and specialised in botany. She was the first lady student to win the Hope prize in chemistry and the Anderson Henry prize in botany, the former before and the latter afer she had graduated B.Sc. with special distinction in botany. ifor several years she worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens under the supervision of Professor Bay ley Balfour. Recently she submitted a thesis for the doctor’s degree on “The Theory and Practice of Vegetative Propagation in the Flowering Plants,'’ which was accepted. She was married in March last to Mr C. Norman Kemp, B.Sc. —Mr William iSmitt, R.8.A., who has just celebrated hie eighty-eighth birthday, is probably the oldest artist who still works regularly with brush and palette, and certainly one of the best-known, for there are said to bo over one million reproductions of his famous picture, “Peace: A Little Child Shall Lead Them.” “ Within the fast fortnight.” he told a Chronicle interviewer. “ 1 have finished a replica of ‘A Little Child Shall Lead Them ’ at the request of members of the peace societies for presentation to the Palace of Peace at The Hague. I worked at it almost daily, and in order to refresh my memory as to the tints 1 journeyed to Wales, where the original now hangs in a private collection.” The coming of age of Francis Douglas Stuart, Lord Donne, eldest son of the seventeenth Earl of Moray, is a happening of unusual interest. For over 60 years there was no direct heir to the Moray earldom. From 1848 to ISO 9 there were six Earls of Moray, none of whom had a son. and it is nearly a century since a Lord Donne came of age. Don no Castle, wh 'ch was appropriately the scene of festivities in connection with Lord Donne’s coming of age, came to the Moray family through marriage. The old castle stands on a peninsula, formed by, the Toith and the Ardoch. at one end of the village of Donne, in Perthshire. It has been said to date from the eleventh century, but was probably either founded or enlarged by Murdoch Stewart, second Duke of Albany, and Governor of Scotland. —Mr J, S. Fry, the head of the firm of Messrs J. S. Frv and Sons, Bristol, who died very recently, was a man of simple faith and simple life. Joseph Storrs Fry was numbered by many of those who knew him best among the saints of these latter days. His wealth was groat, but ho only held it as a trust. Outside Bristol he was very little known cither by sight or reputation, but in that city his public benefactions were princely, and his private charity as large as the warm heart that prompted it. The ehara "' r of the man marked him out as the fine flower of Quaker principles and practice. Every morning, until a short time before his death, ho personally conducted a short service for the thousands of workpeople in the firm’s factory. Mr Fry took a keen interest in the welfare of his workers, and founded many institutions for their benefit.

Civil List pensions—the sums varying from £l2O to £2o have been granted to many people well known in the world of art, letters, and science. Among the grants to the lady relatives of eminent men those to the widows of Coleridge-Taylor and Professor Alphonse Legros will perhaps attract special attention—the one a composer whose early death out short a rare blossoming of original music, the other an artist whose nobihty of temperament and high ideals of draughtsmanship received loss popular recognition than they deserved. “The grant to All - Arthur Symons, who is not an old man, bur, struck down by a lamentableillness, is a recognition of literary merit very conspicuously above the common. Mr Kbenc/.er Howard and Miss Clementina Black arc social workers of a typo invaluable to the country, who have devoted to the public abilities that would have been far belter paid, though less fruitful, if they had devoted them to their private interests”

Referring to the death of the Right Hon. Alfred Lyttelton The Times says:

•" Ho was playing the game of which he was in youth and early manhood one of the foremost living exponents only 10 days ago, and playing it with all the ease and power of a master, when he received the blow that was the approximate, though not, it is believed, the ulterior, cause of Ids sudden prostration. At Eton the famous and popular athlete is the hero of his contemporaries. But no athlete was ever quite such an athlete, and no bovisli hero was ever quite such a hero, as Alfred Lyttelton. The sight of him smiting the cricket ball to, the boundary with lightning-like play of wrist, or snapping it in his gloved hands behind the stumps, or again dribbling the small Eton football at headlong speed down the field, and shouting as he ran. or again scoring stroke after stroke in the racquet court or the fives court, lingers forever in the memory of those who recall it. It would probably be true of him to say that no Englishman in the past half-century has had so unique a faculty of excelling in everv form of sport, or practised it with so g.av a mien, or tuned it. so entirely to the enjoyment of his friends as well as of himself, ‘ But let it not be thought that it is as an athlete alone, or even primarily, that Alfred Lvltclton deserves to be remembered. At Eton and the University ho was one of those whose intellectual powers and moral authority endeared him to his elders and teachers as well as to his contemporaries. and gave him an influence that was neither squandered nor ever used save for good. No man was anything but the better for knowing Alfred Lyttelton.”