Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/526

 of the Order of Merit founded in 1902, was a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, and held the Prussian Order Pour le Mérite. In 1902 he was named a privy councillor. In 1904 he was elected chancellor of the University of Glasgow and published his installation address. He was a member of every foreign academy, and held honorary degrees from almost every university.

After taking part in the British Association meeting of 1907 at Leicester, where he lectured on the electronic theory of matter and joined with keenness in discussions of radioactivity and kindred questions, he went to Aix-les-Bains for change. He had barely reached his home at Largs in September when Lady Kelvin was struck down with a paralytic seizure. Lord Kelvin's misery at her helpless condition was intense, and his vitality was greatly diminished. He had himself suffered for fifteen years from recurrent attacks of facial neuralgia, and a year before underwent a severe operation. A chill now seized him, and after a fortnight's prostration he died on 17 Dec. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 23 Dec. 1907. Lady Kelvin survived him.

In politics he was, up to 1885, a broad liberal; but as an Ulsterman he became an ardent unionist on the introduction of the home rule bill in 1886, and spoke at many political meetings in the West of Scotland in the years which followed. In religion Kelvin was an Anglican — at least from his Cambridge days — but when at Largs attended the Presbyterian Free Church. A simple, unobtrusive, but essential piety was never clouded. He had a deep detestation of ritualism and sacerdotalism, and he denounced spiritualism as a loathsome and vile superstition. But his studies led him again and again to contemplate a beginning to the order of things, and he more than once publicly professed his belief in creative design. Kindly hearted and exceptionally modest, he carried through life intense love of truth and insatiable desire for the advancement of natural knowledge. His high ideals led him to underrate his achievements. 'I know,' he said at his jubilee, 'no more of electric and magnetic force, or of the relation between ether, electricity, and ponderable matter, or of chemical affinity, than I knew and tried to teach to my students in my first session.'

He strove whole-heartedly through life to reach a great comprehensive theory of matter. If he failed to find in the equations of dynamics an adequate and necessary foundation for the theories of electricity and magnetism, or to assign a dynamical constitution to the luminiferous ether, it is because the physical nature of electricity and of ether is probably more fundamental than that of matter itself. But he never allowed his intellectual grasp of physical matters to be clouded by metaphysical cobwebs, and insistently strove for precision of language.

Lord Kelvin's portrait was painted by Lowes Dickinson in 1869 for Peter house. Another portrait by (Sir) Hubert von Herkomer, R.A.,was presented to Glasgow University in 1892. A third portrait by Sir W. Q. Orchardson was presented to the Royal Society by the fellows in 1899. A fourth portrait, by Mr. W. W. Ouless, R.A., was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902. A statue was erected in Belfast in 1910. A Kelvin lectureship in his memory was funded in 1908 at the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and lectures have been given by S. P. Thompson (1908), Sir J. A. Ewing (1910), and H. G. J. Du Bois (1912).

To scientific societies' proceedings or journals Kelvin contributed 661 papers between 1841 and 1908. In 1874 he collected his papers in 'Electrostatics and Magnetism.' In 1882 he began to collect and revise his scattered mathematical and physical papers. Three volumes were issued before his death, and the collection was completed in five volumes (1882-1911) under the editorship of Sir Joseph Larmor. Thomson also wrote for the 'Encyclopædia Britannica' of 1879 the long and important articles on Elasticity and on Heat.

[Silvanus P. Thompson, Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, 2 vols. 1910, with full bibliography; Lord Kelvin's Early Home, being the recollections of his sister, the late Mrs. Elizabeth King, edited by Elizabeth Thomson King; William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, his way of teaching Natural Philosophy, by David Wilson, 1910; Lord Kelvin, by (Sir) Joseph Larmor, in Proc. Roy. Soc. London, 1908; Record of the Royal Soc., 3rd edit. 1912, pp. 205, 247 (with portrait); Lord Kelvin, by John Munro (Bijou Biographies), 1902; Lord Kelvin, his Life and Work, by Alexander Russell, 1912 (The People's Books); Lord Kelvin: an Account of his Scientific Life and Work, by Andrew Gray, 1908; Lord Kelvin: an Oration, by Andrew Gray, 1908; Lord Kelvin's Patents, by Magnus Maclean, Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 1897–8; Lord Kelvin's Contributions to Geology, by J. W. Gregory, Geological Society of Glasgow, 1908; Lord Kelvin: a Biographical Sketch,