with his death. He was a parliamentary reporter from 1866 to 1886, when he was appointed to write the daily summary of the debates in the House of Commons; an arduous post, requiring accuracy, conciseness, and familiarity with parliamentary and public affairs. In 1898 he became summary-writer in the House of Lords, and performed the less exacting duties of that office until the short illness that preceded his death.
Cooper's work for ‘The Times’ left him leisure which he filled industriously. In the compilation of this Dictionary, almost from its inception in 1884 to the publication of the first supplement in 1901, he took a useful and important part. From 1884 to 1891 he prepared from his vast collection of biographical data the successive preliminary lists of names (Baalun-Meyrig) which were distributed at half yearly intervals among the contributors. As a writer of memoirs his work continued longer. No less than 1422 articles from his pen were published in the 63 original volumes (1885–1901). His chief subjects were Roman catholic divines and writers. But he was also responsible for many Cambridge graduates of early date and modern journalists and shorthand writers. His literary and historical insight was not profound, but he had a rare faculty for gathering from obscure sources biographical facts, and his eagerness to acquire new knowledge never lost a youthful zest.
In 1869 Cooper projected a new periodical, the ‘Register and Magazine of Biography,’ but it ceased with the completion of one volume. His most important independent work was his ‘Biographical Dictionary,’ mainly of Englishmen, which first appeared in 1873, and to which a supplement was added ten years later. This incorporates the materials of the unpublished third volume of ‘Athenæ Cantabrigienses,’ and contains much that, at the time of its publication, was not elsewhere accessible. He also wrote biographies published under the title of ‘The Hundred Greatest Men,’ and the letterpress to a series of photographic reproductions of portraits called ‘Men of Mark’ (1876–1883). He was responsible for four editions of ‘Men of the Time,’ 1872, 1875, 1879, and 1884. He was a frequent contributor to ‘Notes and Queries’ for fifty years, his first contribution appearing on 29 Jan. 1853, and his last on 21 April 1903.
He died at his house in Brixton on 5 March 1904, and was buried, with the rites of the Roman catholic church, in Norwood cemetery. He had become a Roman catholic in early life. He married at a youthful age, his wife being a widow with children. He had no issue.
[The Times, March 1904; the Journalist, March 1903; private information.]
COPELAND, RALPH (1837–1905), astronomer, born on 3 Sept. 1837 at Moorside Farm near Woodplumpton, Lancashire, was son of Robert Copeland, yeoman, by his wife Elizabeth Milner. After education at the grammar school of Kirkham, he went to Australia in 1853, and divided five years in the colony of Victoria between work on a sheep run and at the gold diggings.
Being much interested in astronomy, he on his voyage home in 1858 observed the great comet (Donati) of that year. Entering the works of Beyer, Peacock & Co., locomotive engineers, of Manchester, as a volunteer apprentice, he continued his astronomical studies, and with some fellow-apprentices fitted up a small observatory for a 5-inch refractor by Cooke at West Gorton near Manchester. Copeland's first recorded observation was of a non-instantaneous occultation of κ Cancri by the moon on 26 April 1863, which the well-known observer the Rev. W. R. Dawes communicated to the Royal Astronomical Society. Resolved to devote himself exclusively to astronomy, Copeland in 1865 matriculated at the University of Göttingen, and attended the lectures of Klinkerfues, who was in charge of the observatory, and of other professors. With Börgen, a fellow-student, Copeland undertook the observation with the meridian circle of the Göttingen observatory of the position of all the stars down to the ninth magnitude, in the zone two degrees wide immediately south of the celestial equator. The intention was to contribute the result of the observation to a larger scheme then being organised by the Astronomische Gesellschaft, but the work when completed was declined by the Gesellschaft, because the computation did not conform to their plan. Copeland and Börgen's catalogue was published independently in 1869 as the ‘First Göttingen Catalogue of Stars.’
In 1869 Copeland took the degree of Ph.D. with a dissertation on the orbital motion of α Centauri. On 15 June of the same year he and Börgen sailed as members of a German Arctic expedition for the exploration of the east coast of Greenland, their special object being to measure an arc of the meridian in this neighbourhood. They wintered in latitude 74° 32'. Cope-
