Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/1020

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SMITH.

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country air wherever found. Hav- ing been appointed by the Eoyal Mines Commission to inquire into the state of the atmosphere in metalliferous mines, he drew up a very valuable report, which con- tains analyses of the air of mines, and the variations from pure air. It was followed by an Inquiry into the Action of Carbonic Acid on the Circulation of the Blood, by experi- ments made in an air-tight cham- ber, and, in 1864, by a memoir on the Constitution of the Atmo- sphere, including an inquiry into the air on hills, in valleys, and other situations. In conjunction with Mr. McDougall, he examined the action of disinfectants, and especially recommended carbolic or phenic acid, pure or in tar-oil ; and this has been extensively used since that period, in various forms, in this and other countries. He was elected P.E.S. in 1857, and was some time President of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Man- chester. His special inquiries into the quality of the air of towns when polluted by gases from manu- factures, led to his appointment by the Board of Trade, under the Alkali Act of 1863, as Inspector- General of Alkali works for the United Kingdom. The honorary degree of LL.D. was conferred ui)on him by the University of Edinburgh in 1882. He has written a " Life of Dalton, and History of the Atomic Theory up to his Time," official reports to the Board of Health, and to the Royal Society on the Absorption of Gases, various memoirs on the Arts in Ure and Hunt's "New Dictionary of Arts and Sciences," and by desire of the Boyal Cattle Plague Commission, a Memoir on the Action of Disin- fectants generally ; a volume on Disinfection, a Search for Solid Bodies in the Air, and three later investigations on the Salts and Or- ganic Bodies in Air. He calls the subject a new branch by the name of " Chemical Climatology." His

work entitled " Air and Kain : the Beginnings of a Chemical Climat- ology," appeared in 1872. He wrote Part I. of " A Study of Peat," was appointed along with Robert Bawlinson, C.B., Inspector under the Rivers Pollution Act for Eng- land, and afterwards for Scotland also. He has written archsBologi- cal papers on Scottish and Ice- landic subjects, after holiday in- quiries, and a book on the early history of Scotland, entitled " Loch Etive and the Sons of Uisnach." He has published seventeen annual reports on Alkali works, most of them containing investigations on the atmosphere. In 1882 he pub- lished the first report under the Rivers Pollution Prevention Act, containing investigations on water and drainage, and has just written a volume on " Science in Early Manchester." He lives in Man- chester.

SMITH, The Vert Rev. Robbbt Payne, D.D., Dean of Canterbury, bom in Gloucestershire, in Nov., 1818, was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, of which he was scholar, and where he graduated, with second-class honours, in 1841, and obtained the Boden (Sanscrit) and the Pusey and EUerton (He- brew) University Scholarships. In the discharge of his duty as Under- Librarian of the Bodleian, he pub- lished, in a quarto volume, an elaborate Latin Catalogue of the Syriac MSS., belonging to that library ; has edited and translated the Commentary of St. Cyril of Alexandria upon the Gospel of St. Luke — extant only in Syriac — from the MSS brought to this country by Archdeacon Tattam ; and hias translated the curious ecclesiastical history of John of Ephesus, in the same collection of MSS. Dr. Smith is engaged in preparing, for the Delegates of the Orford Press, a Syriac lexicon, based on that of Castelli, but a much lar^^er work, and one that cannot fail greatly to aid Biblical