SOME CONSEQUENCES OF GRAHAM'S WORK 585 



commercialised system of education now so often pass as train- 

 ing. I was therefore allowed and encouraged to learn to help 

 myself and to think for myself, not overweighted with text-book 

 knowledge. When I was little more than a year old as a 

 student of chemistry, Frankland, my trainer— I use the word 

 trainer advisedly in place of teacher — paid me the signal compli- 

 ment of setting me to work out the method of determining the 

 organic matter in drinking water an account of which was 

 published in our joint names in 1868. I have never forgotten 

 his coming to me one day and suggesting that we should carry 

 on combustions in vacuo with the aid of the Sprengel pump — 

 using this in the way Graham had used it — and how he referred 

 me to the paper by Graham published in 1866 on the absorption 

 and dialytic separation of gases by colloid septa — that in which 

 the action of a thin sheet or septum of caoutchouc in separating 

 oxygen from air is described. About this time also, a student- 

 friend, W. C. Roberts— the late Sir Wm. Chandler Roberts- 

 Austen, who lectured to you on the diffusion of metals in 1900— 

 went as assistant to Graham, who was then chemist at the Royal 

 Mint ; I thus became directly interested in Graham's work at an 

 early stage in my career. 



Fortunately I am absolved from dealing with Graham on 

 the personal side. One of my predecessors as Graham lecturer, 

 Dr. Thorpe, when Professor of Chemistry at Anderson's College 

 here, delivered in March 1887 the third of these lectures to your 

 Society and in his lecture and one delivered previously at 

 Leeds in 1877 gave an account of Graham's life and work which 

 is characterised by the lucidity, grace of style and completeness 

 noticeable in Sir Edward Thorpe's writings; the lectures are 

 published in his Essays in Historical Chemistry. 



Prof. Thorpe's discourse to you was on " Certain modern 

 developments of Graham's ideas concerning the constitution 

 of matter." He speaks of Graham as a man who — as no man 

 before him had done — dedicated his life to the study of atoms 

 and atomic motion and quotes Angus Smith as saying : 



"In all his work we find him steadily thinking on the 

 ultimate composition of bodies. He searches after it in follow- 

 ing the molecules of gases when diffusing ; these he watches as 

 they flow into a vacuum or into other gases and observes care- 

 fully as they pass through tubes, noting the effect of weight 

 and of composition upon them in transpiration. He follows 



