Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/421

Rh grant me superannuation allowance to the extent of my full pay. I have served under you nearly forty years, I have taken with you three censuses and I feel confident that I can leave my case in your hands."

Dr. Farr's health failed so rapidly after his retirement that he was soon practically lost to the field of scientific labor in which he had been so long engaged, "and which he had graced," says an English journal, "not only with exceptional intellectual power, but with a genial modesty which charmed all with whom he was brought into contact." His scientific friends, who always regretted that the value of his services had not been recognized and better appreciated by the Government, took measures to raise a testimonial fund for him. Subscriptions were obtained to the amount of nearly a thousand pounds sterling, and this sum was invested at his request, and allowed to accumulate for the benefit of his daughters. An effort is now to be made to obtain a grant from the civil list to his daughters, in connection with which it has been remarked that the value of his work has been more unreservedly acknowledged on the Continent and in America than in his own country, where it has not yet received the recognition it is entitled to at the hands of the nation and its Government.

Dr. Farr's admirable personal and social qualities were well known and esteemed by all who had the privilege of meeting him and being associated with him at scientific assemblies. He was modest, kindly, genial, and bright in his manner, and had a generous appreciation of the services of others. "He was deservedly popular," writes one of his biographers, "in the best sense of that word, and, while the friends who mourn his loss on public and private grounds are innumerable, it seems impossible, to those who knew him, to believe in his having a single enemy."

"As a vital statistician," says an English professional writer, in noticing his death," Dr. Farr's name and work are inseparably bound up with the rise and progress of a science which he had made peculiarly his own. . . . It was the national faith in Dr. Farr, personally, as a vital statistician that invested with so much confidence the registrar-general's statistics, which shed so clear a light upon the black figures of our urban mortality statistics, and thus strengthened the hands of other workers in the field of sanitary reform."