Abstract
THE death of William Henry Besant on June 2 in his eighty-ninth year, will be mourned, in all sincerity, by a far greater num her than he would have anticipated, supposing that he ever wasted a thought on the subject. Among these will be a legion of hi old pupils, who had the opportunity of learning to know him in a peculiarly intimate way. Until 1880 or so Beant and Routh had almost a monopoly, for many years, in coaching pupils for the Mathematical Tripos. Besant's thethod was rather add, but very effective with the right sort of man. At the cost of immense labour he had written out, with his own hand, a set of “book work and rider papers covering the whole range of the examination. The pupil, on each of his three weekly visits, found one of these papers awaiting him in the outside room, and proceeded to answer it as well as he could on the backs of old examination scripts. If he had not brought a pen of his own, he had to search among a lot of ancient quills until he could find one that was not hopelessly spoiled. Presently, Mr. X would be politely summoned to an inner parlour, where his last exercise would be returned to him corrected and annotated, and if he had failed to answer any,question he would be either shown a solution or given a hint how to proceed.
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M., G. DR. W. H. BESANT, F.R.S. . Nature 99, 310–311 (1917). https://doi.org/10.1038/099310a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/099310a0
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