C R O M P T O N —0 ROOS From that date the history of Sir Evelyn Baring, who became Baron Cromer in 1892, G.C.B. in 1895, Viscount in 1897, and Earl in 1901, is the history of Egypt, and requires the barest mention of .its salient points here. From the outset he realized that the task he had to perform could only be effected piecemeal and in detail, and his very first measure was one which, though severely criticized at the time, has been justified by events, and which in any case showed that lie shirked no responsibility and was capable of adopting heroic methods. He temporarily abandoned that portion of the territory over which Egypt held only a nominal sway, already challenged by the Mahdi, and set himself to work to reorganize the remainder. That portion, too, he attacked in detail. The very first essential was to regulate the financial situation; and in Egypt, where the entire revenue is based on the production of the soil, irrigation was of the first importance. With the assistance of Sir Colin Scott Moncrieff, in the Public Works Department, and Sir Edgar Vincent, as Financial Adviser, these two great departments were practically put in order before he gave more than superficial attention to the rest. The Ministry of Justice was the next department seriously taken in hand, with the assistance of Sir John Scott, while the army had been reformed under Sir Evelyn Wood, who was succeeded by Sir Francis Grenfell. Education, the Ministry of the Interior, and gradually every other department, came to be reorganized, or, more correctly speaking, formed, under Lord Cromer’s carefully persistent direction, until it may be said to-day that the Egyptian administration can safely challenge comparison with that of any other state. In the meantime the rule of the Mahdi and his successor, Abdulla Khalifa, in the temporarily abandoned provinces of the Sudan, had been weakened by internal dissensions; the Italians from Massawa, the Belgians from the Congo State, and the French from their West African possessions, had gradually approached nearer to the valley of the Nile; and the moment had arrived at which Egypt must decide either to recover her position at Khartum or allow that important centre to fall into hands hostile to Great Britain and her position in Egypt. Lord Cromer was as quick to recognize the moment for action and to act as he had fifteen years earlier been prompt to recognize the necessity of abstention. In March-September 1896 the first advance was made to Dongola under the Sirdar, Sir H. (now Lord) Kitchener; between July 1897 and April 1898 the advance was pushed forward to the Atbara; and on September 2, 1898, the battle of Omdurman finally crushed the power of the Khalifa and restored the Sudan to the rule of Egypt and Great Britain. To have effected this in the face of the greatest difficulties,—political, national, and international,—and at the same time to have raised the credit of the country from a condition of bankruptcy .to an equality with that of the first European Powers, entitles Lord Cromer to a very high place among the greatest administrators that the British Empire has produced. Lord Cromer married in 1876 Ethel Stanley, daughter of Sir Rowland Stanley Errington, eleventh baronet, but was left a widower with two sons in 1898; and in 1901 he married Lady Katherine Thynne, daughter of the fourth Marquess of Bath. Crompton, a township in the Prestwich division of Lancashire, England, 2-| miles north of Oldham. Since 1894 it has been governed by an urban district council. At Shaw, a large village included within it, is a station on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Population (1891), 12,901; (1901), 13,427. Crookes, Sir William, (1832 ), English chemist and physicist, was born in London on 17th June
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1832, and studied chemistry under Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry. In 1861, while conducting a spectroscopic examination of the residue left in the manufacture of sulphuric acid, he observed a bright green line which had not been noticed previously, and by following up the indication thus given he succeeded in isolating a new metal, thallium, a specimen of which was shown in public for the first time at the Exhibition of 1861. During the next eight years he carried out a minute investigation of this substance and its properties. While determining its atomic weight, he thought it desirable, for the sake of accuracy, to weigh it in a vacuum, and even in these circumstances he found that the balance behaved in an anomalous manner, the metal appearing to be heavier when cold than when hot. This phenomenon he explained as a “ repulsion from radiation,” and he expressed his discovery in the statement that in a vessel exhausted of air a body tends to move away from another body hotter than itself. Utilizing this principle he constructed the radiometer (see Ency. Brit. vol. xix. p. 249 and Supp. Radiometer), which he was at first disposed to regard as a machine that directly transformed light into motion, but which was afterwards perceived to depend on thermal action. Thence he was led to his famous researches on the discharge of electricity through highly rarefied gases and on radiant matter, and to the development of his theory of a “fourth state of matter.” In 1883 he began an inquiry into the nature and constitution of the rare earths. By repeated chemical fractionations he was able to divide yttrium into distinct portions which gave different spectra when exposed in a high vacuum to the spark from an induction coil. This result he considered to be due, not to any removal of impurities, but to an actual splitting-up of the yttrium molecule into its constituents, and he ventured to draw the provisional conclusion that the so-called simple bodies are in reality compound molecules, at the same time suggesting that all the elements have been produced by a process of evolution from one primordial stuff or “ protyle.” A later result of this method of investigation was the discovery of a new member of the rare earths, monium or victorium, the spectrum of which is characterized by an isolated group of lines, only to be detected photographically, high up in the ultra-violet end; the existence of this body was announced in his presidential address to the British Association at Bristol in 1898. In the same address he called attention to the conditions of the world’s food supply, urging that with the low yield at present realized per acre wheat cannot long retain its position among the food-stuffs by which mankind is nourished, and that since nitrogenous manures are essential for an increase in the yield, the hope of averting starvation depends on the ability of the chemist to find an artificial method for fixing the nitrogen of the air. In addition to many other researches besides those here mentioned, Sir William Crookes has edited various books on chemistry and chemical technology, and has also given up a certain amount of time to the investigation of psychic phenomena, endeavouring to effect some measure of correlation between them and ordinary physical laws. He was knighted in 1897, and has received the Royal and Davy medals of the Royal Society, besides having filled the offices of President of the Chemical Society and of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Crookston, capital of Polk county, Minnesota, U.S.A., on the Red Lake River in the edge of Red River valley, on the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific Railways lines. Population (1890), 3457; (1900), 5359. Croos River.
See Nigeria.
