2 PEOFESSOR WILLIAM EAMSAY. 



Society in 1874, a Member of the London Physical Society 

 in 1886, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1888 ; he is 

 one of the original members of the Institute of Chemistry, 

 and of the Society of Chemical Industry. He has served on 

 the Council of the Chemical and Physical Societies, and has 

 been a Vice-President of the Chemical Society and of the 

 Institute of Chemistry. Dv. Ramsay's earliest original 

 work was published in 1872, and for a few years he devoted 

 himself to Organic Chemistry. In 1876, however, he turned 

 his attention to the determination of specific volumes, and 

 devised a new method which has since been frequently 

 used ; since then, a large part of his work has been in the 

 domain of Physical Chemistry, and included researches on 

 dissociation, the vapour pressures of liquids and solids, the 

 volatilisation of solids, the thermal properties of three 

 alcohols, ether, acetic acid, and water, some thermodynami- 

 cal relations, the nature of liquids, the continuity of the 

 gaseous and liquid states of matter, the compressibility of 

 gases under very low pressures, the ratio of the specific 

 heats of gases and vapours through wide ranges of tempera- 

 ture and pressure by a modification of Kundt's method, and 

 the surface energy of liquids from low temperatures up to 

 the critical point by a new method. The last research has 

 led to a method of determininof the molecular condition of 

 liquids. Between the years 1882 and 1887, the present 

 President of the Naturalists' Society was associated with 

 Dr. Ramsay in most of his researches. 



In 1893 Lord Rayleigh observed that the density of 

 nitrogen obtained from atmospheric air was slightly higher 

 than that of nitrogen obtained from its compounds, and it 

 occurred to Professor Ramsay that some light might be 

 thrown on this remarkable discrepancy by absorbing the 

 atmospheric nitrogen by means of strongly heated mag- 



