A tall thin gentlemanly personage, upwards of sixty years of age, with a very marked intelligent countenance … Professor Willis … is a man of versatile intellect and varied pursuits. He can preach sermons, for the ministry is his calling; he can give lucid and graceful lectures, for he has long been Jacksonian Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, and every year gives a number of discourses at the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street; he is a scientific engineer, and as such has been employed on Government commissions and railway inquiries, as well as chosen an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Civil Engineers; he is also enthusiastically attached to architecture, and has written works and read papers on a number of subjects, from the ‘Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral’, down to a dissertation on the ‘Vaults of the Middle Ages’.