On March 17, 1874, as a recognition of his interest in Irish antiquities, Stokes was nominated to the presidency of the Royal Irish Academy. "It was a new departure for the members of that society," says Stokes' biographer, "which is mainly representative of literature and abstract science, to choose a physician as their head, but it was felt that the time had now come when medicine had obtained, owing to the labors of Stokes and others, such a position in {199} the estimation of literary and scientific men that the election of the Regius Professor of that art in Trinity College (to the presidency of the Royal Irish Academy) would be welcomed by the majority." Certainly no member of the medical profession could have been found more deserving of the tribute because of all that he had done for Irish medicine, and besides his broad, sympathetic, liberal interest in Irish antiquities eminently fitted him for this honorable position. When Stokes' death was announced at the beginning of January, 1878, the medical world thought that it had lost one of its most representative men. For some years before his death many honors had come, all unsought, to this worthy protagonist of Irish medicine. He had been made a member of the Prussian order of Merit, and an honorary Fellow of many scientific societies on the Continent. He had received the rare distinction of the degree of LL.D. from Cambridge, and had been similarly honored by many other universities. Perhaps the honor that Stokes himself would have appreciated most came after his death, when the country people who had learned to know and love him asked to be allowed to carry his remains from Carrig Breac to the church of St. Fintan--the "grassy churchyard grave," where he was to be laid beside his beloved wife and children. They laid him in the same grave and beneath the same stone with her who was the beloved companion of his life, and on whose tomb he had engraved these words: "When the ear heard her, then it blessed her; When the eye saw her it rejoiced; When the poor and suffering came unto her They were comforted." Surely a union like theirs was not destined to be but passing. {200}