Sir Leonard Hill, who died on 30 March 1952, in his 86th year, came of a family which could claim distinction both in the scholastic field and for public services. His great grandfather, T. W. Hill, was a disciple of Joseph Priestley, and with his four sons, Arthur, Rowland (the future postal reformer whose efforts resulted in the penny postage, Fellow of this Society), Matthew Davenport (Recorder of Birmingham), and Frederick (the prison reformer), founded a school for boys at Birmingham which was conducted on novel lines which attracted much attention in the early years of the nineteenth century. Arthur Hill was followed as headmaster and owner of the school by his second son, Birkbeck, who married Annie, daughter of Edward Scott, a solicitor of Wigan. The school was moved to Bruce Castle, Tottenham, and it was here that Birkbeck Hill’s son, Leonard, was born on 2 June 1866. Birkbeck Hill sold the school and moved to Burghfield, near Reading, and devoted himself henceforward to literary work, editing Boswell’s Life of Johnson for the Clarendon Press, as well as other John- soniana. Leonard Hill, after going to a preparatory school at Bournemouth, which he disliked, went to Haileybury, where he followed the ordinary classical course, but received only poor mathematical training and had no opportunity at all for the study of natural science. Nevertheless, he attained the sixth form owing, as he maintained, to his knowledge of history, literature and scripture rather than to his acquaintance with the ancient languages, and at the same time he gained a reputation as a Rugby football player. He wanted to be a farmer, but his parents had other ideas, and decided that his elder brother, Maurice, should be a barrister (he was subsequently a judge in the Admiralty and Divorce Courts), that another brother, Norman, should be a solicitor (at a later date he became secretary to the Steam Shipping Association of Liverpool and an authority on shipping in the first World War), and that Leonard should enter the medical profession.