Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/112

104 These results, corroborated as they are by many subsequent experiments, in various parts of India, conclusively show that all the alkaloids of cinchona possess a nearly equal curative value, and hence the conclusion is that all combined possess a value very little if at all inferior to quinine. The doses are about the same. Cinchona alkaloid is now largely used throughout the country, with a proportionate reduction in the demand for quinine.

 

IR JOHN LUBBOCK is one of that class of men of whom each age can present only a few brilliant specimens, who are at home, and masters, in pursuits of the most diversified character. He is almost equally distinguished as a banker and man of business, as a zoölogist, ethnologist, and archæologist, and as a publicist and parliamentarian. He stands in the front rank among bankers, while he occupies a prominent position among naturalists, and "is a standing proof that an industrious man of active mind may at once be diligent in business while serving science." "His name," says one of his most appreciative biographers, "is equally familiar to the ethnologists and entomologists of New York or of Moscow, in the counting-houses where the world's business is settled, and among the Maidstone Liberals, who every four years temporarily lose their voices with crying, 'Sir John and liberty! 'Most curious of all, the cause of this reputation in one circle is little known to those in the other two. The Kentish rustics may know that the 'Squire' is fond of looking at queer things, and the bankers may have sometimes listened to him at the Royal Institution or in Parliament; but each set of men judge their many-sided friend by their own standard, and in each department he has rendered services which ought to command the respect in which he is indubitably held."

Sir John Lubbock derives his versatility in a very large measure by inheritance. His father, Sir John William Lubbock—the third baronet of that name—was head of the banking-house to which the son has succeeded, and earned a more enduring fame as an astronomical and mathematical writer. He was for twelve years Treasurer and Vice-President of the Royal Society, and was the author of works on "The Lunar Theory," "Perturbation of the Planets," "Researches on the Tides," the "Theory of Probabilities," and other publications, which are still quoted as authorities. His treatise on "Probabilities": anticipated that of Quetelet by several years, and, being published anonymously, was for some time ascribed to De Morgan.

The present baronet, the subject of this sketch, was born in 