| dc.description.abstract | In May last, at the first of our meetings which followed Dr.
Ingram's lamented death, the President paid a just tribute
to the memory of "one of our most distinguished members,"
and to "the great work which he did for Ireland in this
Society." But the observations then made were, necessarily,
confined to a brief and passing reference; for the occasion
was not appropriate to such a considered notice of Dr.
Ingram's career, and particularly of his connection with the
Statistical Society, as it has long been our custom to devote
to the commemoration of those who have been most
conspicuously associated with the Society's work. Since the
name of Dr. Ingram must always be held in reverent remembrance
amongst us, not merely as one of the most eminent in
the list of our Presidents, but as that of, perhaps, the most
distinguished authority on economics who has ever adorned
the roll of our Society, it has been thought desirable that
something in the nature of a formal memoir should be
prepared for our Journal. It is hardly needful to remark
that, in consenting to become the medium for such a tribute
as we desire to pay to Dr. Ingram's memory, I have no
pretension whatever to speak with authority on the value
or permanence of those weighty contributions to the history
of social and economic science by which his name
is likely to be most enduringly remembered. Were
the passing of such judgment the proper task of the
writer of this memorial notice, the Society must have looked
elsewhere for its author. But I conceive my function to be
the more limited one of combining with a brief record of the
main facts of Dr. Ingram's life, an account of his work in this
Society, and of the part he took in founding it, together
with a statement of the purpose and substance of those important contributions with which, from time to time, he
enriched our Journal. In endeavouring to comply with the
wishes of our Council, it is impossible to find a more apt
precedent for the form of such a notice than that which was
supplied by Dr. Ingram himself in his memoir of the late
Dr. Neilson Hancock; a memoir which, though it defies
imitation in the justness of its proportions, and the lucidity
of its exposition, may fittingly become the model for all our
future attempts to appraise the work of our worthiest
members. | en |
