Viii OBITUARY NOTICES. 



intellect from all sides. He was created K.C.B. in 1902 and re- 

 ceived the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1904, besides having had 

 various orders and medals conferred upon him, and having been 

 made an honorary member of nearly all the learned academies and 

 chemical societies of the world. Many of these distinctions came 

 from Germany, where he formerly had warm friends ; but on the 

 outbreak of the war his patriotism and his sense of justice and honor 

 made him a firm and outspoken upholder of the cause of the 

 Entente Allies, and even during his lingering and painful illness he 

 did all in his power to help his country in her time of need. In 1881 

 he married Miss Margaret Buchanan, who survives him, with one 

 son, one daughter, and three grandchildren. He died, all too soon, 

 on the 23d of July, 1916, in his sixty-fourth year, at his country 

 estate at Haslemere in Bucks, England. 



Ramsay, in his own brief autobiographical sketch, has acknowl- 

 edged freely the debt which he sometimes owed to others for ideas 

 and suggestions, proclaiming his belief that scientific men should 

 help one another and seek help whenever they could, and adding 

 that he always endeavored to acknowledge specific cases of indebted- 

 ness to others whenever possible. Nevertheless, he was full of 

 initiative and originality himself. The study of his work shows 

 that the following were among the attributes of his genius : an 

 intense curiosity and enthusiasm with regard to everything new, 

 an excellent experimental technique in dealing with gases, a great 

 fertility of fruitful ideas, a daring scientific imagination, and de- 

 voted persistence in any promising line of work. The happy aggre- 

 gation of these and other qualifications led Ramsay to successes 

 significant enough to put his name high on the roll of the leaders of 

 chemistry for all time. To him science owes a priceless debt for 

 investigations which, in the short space of a score of years, made 

 an unparalleled contribution, in that they revealed to the world a 

 whole group of hitherto unknown elements possessing properties 

 both unexpected and unique. 



Theodore W. Richards. 



