Abstract
THE wonderful romance of the life of Sir John Rhys and the great work which he did for Celtic learning have formed the theme of many a writer during the past week. In the pages of NATURE it is appropriate to speak of the man as he appeared to his scientific friends. The dominant qualities of his mind, as they were again and again revealed in intimate personal contact, were a never-failing freshness and elasticity together with the keen insight which seized at once upon the larger problems. “Well, what has been going on in science lately?” was his invariable question when we met after an interval; and his deep interest was always there, whether the subject was radio-activity, or some new light upon heredity and evolution, or Arrhenius's hypothesis of life-bearing germs, persisting from the eternal past, permeating all space, and driven by the pressure of light to all the worlds. And it was just the same in the province where he was master. John Rhys was always looking for the big, far-reaching conclusions. Place-names in the Iberian peninsula were the data for inferring a former southward extension of the Basques; while their northern migration was tentatively suggested by the names of chiefs among the Picts, that mysterious pepple of which scarcely anything is certainly known. The present writer has heard him tell of the Irish chieftain of whom it is recorded in time-worn stone that he was “the sumrnorier of the fairies” evidence for a fascin-ating interpretation of an ancient folk-lore. The fairies, being, an older race, living, in caves and clinging to the hills, would still be called on by their conquerors, to assist, for example, in repelling some new invader. Such were the delightful subjects of which he. talked with scientific friends, and those who would wish to trace, in brief compass, the working of his master mind, cannot do better than read and re-read his presidential address to Section H of the British Association at Bradford (1900), in which he “endeavoured to substitute for the rabble of divinities and demons, of fairies and phantoms that disport themselves at large in Celtic legend, a possible succession of peoples, to each of which should be ascribed its own proper attributes.”
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P., E. Sir John Rhys . Nature 96, 484 (1915). https://doi.org/10.1038/096484a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/096484a0