xxxii Anmial Report of the Counczl. 



Professor Rodert Wilhelm Bunsen was elected an 

 honorary member of this Society on the 17th of April, i860. 

 In a letter addressed to the writer of this notice Bunsen 

 expressed his lively sense of the honour which the Society had 

 clone hini, an honour which he specially valued as connecting 

 his name with one of the oldest scientific societies in the 

 country, and in this way also with the name of one of the most 

 illustrious of chemical discoverers, John Dalton. 



Bunsen was born in Goltingen in iSii, and died in Heidel- 

 berg in August, 1899. He therefore attained the patriarchal 

 age of 88, and had for upwards of half a century devoted 

 himself wholly and ungrudgingly to the service of science. To 

 enumerate all his discoveries, much less to give an account of 

 them, wouM be here out of place. All that can be attempted 

 is to give an idea of the character of his life's work, and to 

 point out in a few words the position in the world of science 

 which his work has won for him. In the first place, then, 

 Bunsen was not only a great investigator and a wonderful 

 experimentalist, but also a distinguished and devoted teacher. 

 And, after all, perhaps his work as a teacher forms his greatest 

 claim to the gratitude of posterity. For his influence on the 

 younger generation of chemists and physicists was so potent, 

 and spread over so wide an area, that its results may be truly 

 said to vie with those of his most brilliant experimental 

 investigations. The main characteristics of these investigations 

 are, in the first place, their wide scope, for they relate to almost 

 every one of the numerous branches of chemical enquiry, and, in 

 the second place, their accuracy and the experimental skill with 

 which they are carried out. Naturally, therefore, each of these 

 investigations has become classical ; each is a model of its kind, 

 and the problem proposed by each is solved with a completeness 

 and mastery which makes further work on the subject superfluous. 

 Bunsen's personal character was that of the simple-minded 

 striver after truth, of a man devoted heart and soul to the unravel- 

 ling of nature's secrets. In the quiet of his laboratory he opened 

 out fields of investigation which have already borne fruit of 



