Prof. S. A. Hill

Abstract

THE last Indian mail of September brings us the sad news of the death of Prof. S. A. Hill, one of the best-known of that small band of scientific workers, to whom we owe our present knowledge of Indian meteorology. He has been struck down suddenly, in the full maturity of his powers, and in the prime of life, after a few days’ illness which gave no reason to anticipate so fatal a result. The son of a clergyman in the north of Ireland, Mr. Hill, after studying in the London School of Mines, and taking the degree of Bachelor of Science in the London University, was appointed, in 1876, to the Professorship of Physical Science in the Muir College, Allahabad, and, shortly after his arrival in India, received the additional appointment of Meteorological Reporter to the Government of the North-West Provinces, in succession to Mr. John Eliot, now the head of the Meteorological Department of the Government of India. In these combined offices, Prof. Hill has laboured for nearly fifteen years. In such spare hours as he could dispose of amid the exacting duties of his educational appointment and the administrative work of his office, in a climate which is but little favourable to mental or physical exertion, he devoted himself assiduously to those original investigations which have made his name familiar to the meteorologists of Europe and America. On subjects dealing with questions of terrestrial physics, he published numerous papers of high value and much originality in the Indian Meteorological Memoirs, the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Austrian Zeitschrift für Meteorologie, and the Meteorologische Zeitschrift; and an elaborate memoir on some anomalies in the winds of Northern India, in the 178th volume of the Philosophical Transactions. In this memoir he boldly endeavoured to map out the distribution of atmospheric pressure over India, at a height of 10,000 feet above sea-level, and showed how this distribution, differing greatly from that at the earth's surface, explains much that is otherwise anomalous in the winds experienced at the lower level, and especially the dry land-winds which play so conspicuous, and occasionally disastrous, a rôle in the meteorology of India. To the pages of this journal he was also a not infrequent contributor.