Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/609

 latitude reached. Symptoms of scurvy and the breakdown of Shackleton made the return journey difficult. After the return of the expedition to England, Wilson prepared the monograph on the mammals and birds observed and collected. In 1905 he served on the royal commission on grouse disease, and he was the author of various papers in the published report. He also prepared many of the illustrations for G. E. H. Barrett-Hamilton's History of British Mammals (1910).

In 1910 Scott invited Wilson to join his new Antarctic expedition in the Terra Nova as chief of the scientific staff. The value of the detailed exploration and researches in Victoria Land made by this expedition were overshadowed by the loss of the entire party of five on the return journey from the Pole (February–March 1912). From the expedition's base at Cape Evans, Wilson, with Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Lieutenant H. R. Bowers, R.I.M., made a remarkable five weeks' journey (June to August 1911) to Cape Crozier and back in mid-winter darkness, fierce blizzards, and temperatures as low as -70° F., in order to obtain chicks of the Emperor penguin. The journey was a great test of endurance and proved Wilson's perfect fitness. The journey to the Pole began 1 November 1911. After the last supporting party returned, from lat. 86° 32′ S., Scott had with him Wilson, Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates [q.v.], Lieutenant Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans. The Pole was reached 18 January 1912. On the return journey the party was delayed by difficult surface conditions, strong winds, and low temperatures. Evans died 17 February, and Oates heroically sacrificed himself when he saw that his weak condition impeded his comrades' progress; but eventually, overcome by bad weather and lack of food, Scott, Wilson, and Bowers perished on or about 29 March in lat. 79° 40′ S. The bodies were found in the following November by a search-party from the base, and buried beneath a cairn of snow, surmounted by a cross. Scott's diaries speak in terms of warm praise of Wilson's courage and steadfastness in the face of all difficulties: he was one of the most valued and best loved members of the expedition.

Wilson received the Polar medal (1904) and posthumously (1913) the Patron's medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Some of his paintings are in the house of the Royal Geographical Society. A statue of him, the work of Lady Scott, stands on the Promenade, Cheltenham.

Wilson married in 1901 Oriana Fanny, daughter of the Rev. Francis Abraham Souper, of Bedford, and had no children.  WILSON, JOHN COOK (1849–1915), philosopher, the only son of the Rev. James Wilson, a Methodist minister, by his wife, Hannah, daughter of John Cook, of Newcastle-under-Lyme, was born at Nottingham 6 June 1849. Educated at Derby grammar school and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained first classes in classics and mathematics, both in moderations and the final examinations, he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College in 1874; he also won the Chancellor's Latin essay prize in 1873, and the Conington prize in 1882. After holding a tutorship at Oriel he was elected Wykeham professor of logic in 1889, and retained the chair until his death. He resided continuously in Oxford, except for a brief period of study in Germany, where he came strongly under the influence of Hermann Lotze, and met his future wife, Charlotte, daughter of A. D. Schneider, of Gifhorn, Hanover, whom he married in 1876. There was one son of the marriage. Mrs. Wilson's health failed for many years, and the burden thus thrown upon him materially hampered his academic activities and in the end wore him out. He died at Oxford 11 August 1915.

He was singularly human—appreciative of the simpler pleasures, generous, warm-tempered but easily appeased, and resentful of anything which he thought unjust. Unselfish, affectionate, and loyal almost to a fault, he had a great capacity for friendship with people of all ages and many different kinds.

Cook Wilson's equipment as a philosopher was such as only one or two in a generation can attain. He was at once a good mathematician and a good scholar. An intensive study in his earlier years of the great philosophers, and especially of Plato and Aristotle, gave him an unrivalled background for his own inquiries. He had a great feeling for facts. His mind was independent, cautious, and intensely critical. Thus equipped, he seemed one of the few capable of doing philosophical work of that rare kind 583