I knew Sir Arthur Eddington first as a shy undergraduate
of my own year, and shy he remained to the end. Never was there a more unassuming man, though, with an O.M. at the unprecedentedly early age of 55, he certainly took rank as one of the three or four greatest scientists in the country. He had been Plumian Professor of Astro- nomy at Cambridge since 1913—when he was only thirty—and lived alone (for he was unmarried) at the Observatory on the Madingley Road. He might have written more than he did on the reconcili- ation of science and religion, for in his own mind the reconciliation was complete, but even his Swarthmore Lecture on " Science and the Unseen World," delivered before the Society of Friends in 1929 (Eddington was a regular attendant at the Friends' Meeting in Jesus Lane), was fairly stiff' going for the non-scientist. * * * *
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