In the death of Professor Ida Ward in the Guildford Hospital on 10th October 1949, just after her sixty-ninth birthday, African studies lost one of their greatest exponents, and Africa one of its best friends.

Ida Caroline Ward was born in Bradford on the 4th October 1880, the eighth child of a Yorkshire wool merchant. Prom a school in Bradford she went to the Darlington Training College and later to Durham University, where she graduated B.Litt. with distinction. The North Country background of her early years remained with her always and gave a delightful “ common-sense ” colour to her character.

After sixteen years of teaching in secondary schools, she joined the Phonetics Department under Professor Daniel Jones in University College, London, in 1919, and soon established herself as an authority in the phonetics of the main European languages and in the study of speech defects. Noteworthy works of this period are A Handbook of English Intonation (written in collaboration with the late Lilian E. Armstrong), The Phonetics of English, and Speech Defects, Their Nature and Cure. Her interest in her mother tongue persisted, and she was actually working on another edition of the book on English Intonation when she died.

It was while lecturing at University College to missionaries that her interests turned towards West African languages—Kanuri, Igbo and Efik were her first fields of African research—and her first major work, The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Efik (for which the University of London awarded her the D.Lit. in 1933), threw a new light on the study of these languages, and showed that intonation, that element hitherto so elusive, was one that could and should be studied if justice was to be done to African languages.

The death of Mīrzā, Muḥammad Khān Qazvīnī is a great loss to scholarship, and will be felt most keenly in Persia itself, where men of such learning are rare to-day. I do not propose to say much here about the details of his life, for in 1924 he wrote a fairly full autobiography, which was published with four other lives as an appendix to The Bulletin of the Sciences of Finance and Economics, Tehran. This autobiography was reprinted in a collection of his articles called Bīst Maqāleḥ e Qazvīnī Vol. I (ed. Poure-Davoud, Bombay, 1928). More recently he wrote a shorter account of his life, which was published in the monthly periodical Yaghmā (Miḥr 1327/Sept. 1948). He died on 27th May 1949, when he was 72 years old, having been born in March 1877/Rabī’ I 1294. A moving obituary by his great fellow-scholar, S. H. Taqizādeh, appeared in the Ittilā‘āt, and The Times of London published an obituary notice a week later.

Qazvīnī's father was a scholar of some repute, and one of the four jointauthors of the great Persian biographical work Nāmeh-e Dāneshvar¯n. Qazvīnī himself, who was born in Tehran, was educated under the traditional Eastern system, and learnt more by his own efforts than from formal instruction. He was orphaned before he was twelve, and soon afterwards became a student (ṭalaba) in one of the old religious colleges supported by charitable bequests; but like other zealous students he managed to attend the lectures of all the eminent masters of his time.