Memoir and Letters of Sidney Gilchrist Thomas. Edited by R.
W. Burnie. (John Murray.)—This is a remarkable biography, not so much for its execution, though this is just what could be wished, as for the remarkable interest of the subject. S. G. Thomas was an inventor, who worked out his results under no small difficulties, and who had the good fortune to receive the due reward of his genius. Add to this that the wealth which he thus acquired he held on the strictest principles of its being a trust rather than a possession, and we have a remarkable combination of ability, good fortune, and high principle. After a brief experience of teaching, he obtained a junior clerkship in the Thames Police Office. This post he held for twelve years, discharging its duties with such success, that the Magistrates of the Court joined in an effort to
induce the Home Office to depart from the rule of seniority, and appoint him to a vacant senior clerkship. And yet for nearly all
this time he had been giving his best energies and thoughts to the working out of a discovery, the dephosphorisation of iron. He studied mineralogy and chemistry; he made experiments with his own limited means ; and he lent continual assistance to the ex- periments which a relative, with more appliances at his command, continued to carry on. And at last he succeeded. He achieved the solution of a problem at which experts had vainly toiled. In the remarkable annals of invention there are few pages more interesting, and indeed more thoroughly satisfactory in every way, than this memoir of S. G. Thomas. He died in his thirty-seventh year, of pulmonary disease.
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