Obituary notices of fellows deceased

Abstract

Archibald Smith, only son of James Smith, of Jordanhill, Renfrewshire, was born on the 10th of August, 1813, at Greenhead, Glasgow, in the house where his mother’s father lived. His father, who also was a Fellow of the Royal Society, had literary and scientific tastes with a strongly practical turn, fostered no doubt by his education in the University of Glasgow and his family connexion with some of the chief founders of the great commercial community which has grown up by its side. In published works on various subjects he left enduring monuments of a long life of actively employed leisure. His discovery of different species of Arctic shells, in the course of several years dredging from his yacht, and his inference of a previously existing colder climate in the part of the world now occupied by the British Islands, constituted a remarkable and important advancement of Geological Science. In his 'Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul,’ a masterly application of the principles of practical seamanship renders St. Luke’s narrative more thoroughly intelligible to us now than it can have been to contemporary readers not aided by nautical knowledge. Later he published a ‘Dissertation on the Origin and Connexion of the Gospels;’ and he was engaged in the collection of further materials for the elucidation of the same subject up to the time of his death, at the age of eighty-five. Archibald Smith’s mother was also of a family distinguished for intellectual activity. Her paternal grandfather was Dr. Andrew Wilson, Professor of Astronomy in the University of Glasgow, whose speculations on the constitution of the sun are now generally accepted, especially since the discovery of spectrum-analysis and its application to solar physics. Her uncle, Dr. Patrick Wilson, who succeeded to his father’s Chair in the University, was author of papers in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ on Meteorology and on Aberration.