364 WILLIAM PRESCOTT DEXTER. 



who held the Chair of Chemistry and Materia Medica in Harvard 

 College from 1783 to 1816, and was thenceforth Professor Emeritus 

 until his death in 1829. 



When thirteen years old, William P. Dexter passed from the Boston 

 Latin School to Harvard College, and was graduated thence in 1838, 

 and from the Harvard Medical School in 1842. He established him- 

 self as a practising physician, first in Boston and then in Brookline, 

 and devoted himself to this profession during a number of years. In 

 1847 he married Margaret Austin, daughter of William Austin, lawyer 

 and essayist, always to be remembered in American literature as the 

 author of " Peter Rugg, the Missing Man." 



The following sketch of Dexter's after life has been furnished by 

 his friend, Dr. William J. Russell, of London. 



William Prescott Dexter was born at Boston, on the 10th of Decem- 

 ber, 1820. He studied medicine at Harvard College, and graduated in 

 1838. After leaving college, he practised medicine at Brookline for a 

 few years, but his strong interest in pure science and his longing to 

 devote himself solely to scientific pursuits made him feel the irksome- 

 ness of the ordinary routine of a medical practitioner's life, and induced 

 him to give up the medical profession, and to go abroad in order to 

 study chemistry. From this time to the end of his life he devoted 

 himself entirely to the prosecution of that science. His interest in 

 and devotion to chemistry never flagged, and although he did not re- 

 side permanently in any one place, but lived in different parts of 

 Germany, in England, and occasionally returned to America for a 

 short time, still his one great interest in life was the study of chemis- 

 try, and wherever he settled for any length of time he always had a 

 laboratory. Few there are who have devoted their lives so entirely 

 to science simply for its own sake. No desire for place or for emolu- 

 ment stimulated Dexter's love for chemistry ; it was a pure desire to 

 increase knowledge and to learn with rigorous accuracy the true 

 nature of the phenomena he was interested in. In organic chemis- 

 try he took comparatively little interest ; the theoretical conceptions 

 which play so important a part in this branch of chemistry he was 

 loath to admit, and he did not sufficiently believe in them to be inter- 

 ested by them ; but it was in inorganic chemistry, and especially in the 

 analytical branch of the science, that his whole interest was centred. 

 Rose's Analytical Chemistry was ever a book of fascinating interest to 

 him. He studied it when in America, when he had little or no means 

 of carrying out its precepts, and it was this book which induced him 

 to give up his professional career and go to Germany, and it was to 



