Prof. John Milne, F.R.S.

Abstract

TO few men is it given to follow the growth of a new science from its infancy to maturity, and to still fewer to be prime movers in bringing about such a development. Nevertheless this is the claim we can confidently make for Dr. John Milne. He found seismology in its embryo stage, as left by the pioneer Robert Mallet—with its instruments of the most unsatisfactory type, its observational methods of the crudest description, and its inferences far from conclusive—but he lived to see well-equipped seismographical observatories scattered all over the globe, seismo-logical societies established in every civilised State, and the science of seismology universally recognised as an important and highly suggestive branch of geophysics. And it was undoubtedly to Milne's genius and energy that the impulse leading to these results has been largely due. Yet he had not reached the age of sixty-three when he died on July 31, and his earthquake studies were comprised within a period of thirty-five years!