Lady Huggins in her original draft of the obituary notice of my sister Agnes, which appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, included some words of personal appreciation and of reference to her family which were omitted from the copy sent for publication, as being, possibly, somewhat beyond the scope of a purely scientific journal. At my request Lady Huggins has consented to the full original draft, with a few additions, being published for private circulation. She has also, to my great gratification, and entirely on her own initiative, taken this opportunity of adding an appreciation of my elder sister.

My sisters’ acquaintance with Lady Huggins commenced only after they had been some time permanently resident in London; and for the accuracy of the statements relating to their earlier lives I am alone responsible. Their father had died before the period of which Lady Huggins speaks from personal knowledge; and perhaps it is fit that I should supplement what she says as to the influence of family life upon the characters and careers of my sisters by mentioning a few facts connected with my father. Although a classical scholar of Trinity College, Dublin, his interests were for the most part scientific. In our earliest years his recreation was chemistry, the consequential odours of which used to excite the wrath of our Irish servants. Later a “big telescope” (4 inch aperture) was mounted in the garden, and we children were occasionally treated to a glimpse of Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s satellites. In an age before railways and telegraphs had reached the remote parts of Ireland and before clocks were “synchronised with Greenwich,” the local time would have gone “all agley” had it not been for my father’s observations with his “orthochronograph.” These trivial things show that it was in an environment of scientific suggestion that our early lives were passed; and to me, at all events, my father’s influence was more than suggestion, for to his painstaking teaching I have to attribute any little successes which I subsequently achieved.

It is difficult for me to express to Lady Huggins my thanks in fitting terms, for to thank implies a service; and her work has been not a service to me, but a labour of love for those whose simple lives she records. Still I may say that I am deeply gratified by this finished product of her pen, and that I rejoice that she should have conceived the idea of writing this Appreciation, thereby enabling me to place it before the eyes of many friends.

I have to thank Director Frost of the Yerkes Observatory for his permission to reprint that part of the “Appreciation” which has already appeared.

AUBREY ST. JOHN CLERKE.

68 Redcliffe Square, S.W.