386 HENRY BARKER HILL 



director, while Professor Charles Loring Jackson was made 

 chairman of the department. During the nine years of the 

 directorship Professor Hill, with the utmost ingenuity, remod- 

 elled and enlarged an old and unsuitable building with such 

 success as to provide available accommodation for over seven 

 hundred men, and to increase immensely the efficiency of the 

 institution. Administrative work of this kind was undertaken 

 with the conscious sacrifice of some of his dearly cherished scien- 

 tific ideals, but no murmur of complaint escaped him. The 

 long service of thirty-three years to Harvard University was 

 unremitting, for he never claimed the occasional holiday-year 

 which was his due. 



On September 2, 187 1, he was married to Miss Ellen Grace 

 Shepard, who with their son, Edward Burlingame Hill, sur- 

 vives him. In recent years their summers have been spent in 

 Dublin, New Hampshire, and bicycle rides thence to Cambridge 

 on laboratory business were not unusual occurrences during the 

 summer months. 



Besides being a member of the Washington Academy, Pro- 

 fessor Hill belonged to a number of other scientific societies. 

 The National Academy of Sciences elected him to membership 

 as long ago as 1883, and he was also a Fellow of the American 

 Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American 

 and German chemical societies. 



Professor Hill's original scientific work was marked by the 

 quality which preeminently characterized his whole life — ab- 

 solute sincerity. At the outset, great enthusiasm enabled him 

 soon to overcome the handicap of his somewhat inadequate 

 training, and even his first paper on methyluric acid was an un- 

 usually thorough and convincing piece of work. Soon after- 

 wards his fortunate discovery of the rare substance furfurol 

 among the products of the dry distillation of wood, enabled him 

 to begin its investigation, and for twenty years his best thought 

 was given to the derivatives of this substance, especially to 

 pyromucic, mucobromic and mucochloric acids. This series of 

 investigations constitutes a remarkably complete and systematic 

 whole, raising a large group of substances from a position of 

 oblivion to one of commanding importance. Later his dis- 



