Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/432

 work, his pedigrees of disease being characterized by a high degree of orderly observation and meticulous accuracy. The importance of his researches on heredity were recognized by his election to the fellowship of the Royal Society in 1912, and in 1922 by the republication, delayed by the War, of much of his work in a memorial volume of the Treasury of Human Inheritance (Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs XXI, Anomalies and Diseases of the Eye, 1922).

In 1902 the Nettleship medal ‘for the encouragement of scientific ophthalmic work’ was founded by Nettleship's colleagues and former students, as a tribute to his character and to his outstanding qualities as a scientific exponent of ophthalmology. In 1909 the medal was awarded to Nettleship himself in recognition of his researches on heredity in diseases of the eye.

Nettleship died at Hindhead, Surrey, 30 October 1913. He had married in 1869 Elizabeth Endacott, daughter of Richard Whiteway, gentleman farmer, of Compton, Devon. There were no children of the marriage.  NICHOLSON, EDWARD WILLIAMS BYRON (1849–1912), scholar and librarian, the only son of Edward Nicholson, R.N., by his wife, Emily Hamilton Wall, was born 16 March 1849 at St. Helier, Jersey. He was educated at Llanrwst grammar school, at Liverpool College, and at Tonbridge School, from which he went as a classical scholar to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1867. He gained a first class in classical moderations (1869), a third class in law and history (1871), the Gaisford prize for Greek verse (1871), and the Hall-Houghton Junior Greek Testament prize (1872). After taking his degree Nicholson was for a short time a schoolmaster, but he gave up this work in 1873 when he was appointed librarian of the London Institution, a post which he held till 1882. In 1877 he was one of the founders of the first European conference of librarians, of which he acted as joint-secretary with Henry Richard Tedder; and in the same year he helped to organize the Library Association, of which also he was joint-secretary (1877–1878). He always retained a fatherly interest in the activities of the Association. When Henry Octavius Coxe [q.v.], Bodley's librarian, died in 1881, it was evident that the great Oxford library had reached a point in its development at which modern methods and requirements must be considered. A young man of energy and experience was needed, and Nicholson, then in his thirty-fourth year, possessed both. He was appointed (1882) partly through the influence of Benjamin Jowett, shortly to be vice-chancellor, and immediately set about a thorough reorganization of the library. He introduced a detailed scheme of shelf-classification and arrangement, reformed the method of cataloguing and provided an improved code of rules for cataloguers, organized a subject catalogue, increased the staff, and added in many smaller ways to the usefulness of the collections. At the same time he worked hard to improve the financial position of the library and to promote far-reaching schemes for its extension, including the provision of an underground storage room which was only completed after his death. The need of these may be judged from the fact that the contents of the library more than doubled in amount during Nicholson's term of office.

Nicholson's personal interests were of the most varied, ranging over biblical criticism, Celtic antiquities, comparative philology (under the influence of Friedrich Max Müller), folk-lore, music, palaeography, numismatics, athletics. He was a violent opponent of vivisection, and held somewhat extreme radical views. In his many activities, some of them revolutionary, it was inevitable that he should meet with strong opposition. He was not by nature conciliatory, and received little consideration from his opponents. Yet though vigorous and even obstinate in the pursuit of his aims, he was just, honourable, and magnanimous, while to the young and to any one in need of help he showed an unexpected sympathy. His many controversies, combined with incessant work, eventually told on his strength. His health began to fail in 1902, and for the next ten years he was more and more affected by heart trouble. He died in Oxford on 17 March 1912.

Nicholson's work lay, not altogether by his own choice, in administration rather than in scholarship, but the list of his literary productions shows that he did not neglect the latter. Besides numerous controversial fly-sheets, articles in periodicals and official papers, he published the following works: Sir John Mandeville, the English Herodotus (1873), The Christ-Child, and Other Poems (1877), Transactions … of the Conference of Librarians 406