It is doubtful if he ever recovered a sure
grasp upon the things of life; and he was still unconscious when he
passed away, June the twelfth, 1885, in the fifty-third year of his
age. He passed; but something in his gallant vitality had
impressed itself upon his friends, and still impresses. Not from
one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale of how the
imagination refuses to accept our loss and instinctively looks for
his reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image like
things of yesterday. Others, the well-beloved too, die and are
progressively forgotten; two years have passed since Fleeming was
laid to rest beside his father, his mother, and his Uncle John; and
the thought and the look of our friend still haunt us.
APPENDIX.
NOTE ON THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF FLEEMING JENKIN TO ELECTRICAL AND
ENGINEERING SCIENCE. BY SIR WILLIAM THOMSON, F.R.S., LL D., ETC.,
ETC.
IN the beginning of the year 1859 my former colleague (the first
British University Professor of Engineering), Lewis Gordon, at that
time deeply engaged in the then new work of cable making and cable
laying, came to Glasgow to see apparatus for testing submarine
cables and signalling through them, which I had been preparing for
practical use on the first Atlantic cable, and which had actually
done service upon it, during the six weeks of its successful
working between Valencia and Newfoundland.
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