640 BUNSEN MEMORIAL LECTURE. 



I will now say a few words about Bunsen as a lecturer. 



Bunsen lectured on general chemistry every morning- in the week 

 from 8 to 9 in the sunnner, and from 9 to 10 in the winter semester. 

 The lectures were interesting and instructive, not from any striving 

 after oratorical effect, or by any display of " firework""' experiments, 

 but from the originality of both matter and illustration. His exposi^ 

 tion was clear, and his delivery easy, and every point upon which he 

 touched was treated in an original fashion; no book, of course, was 

 used or referred to; indeed, he avoided nuich consultation of handbooks, 

 the only two which I have seen him occasionally turn to for the pur- 

 pose of looking up some facts about which he had doubts were Gmelin 

 and Roscoe and Schorlemmer. When occasionally one of the practi- 

 canten consulted him about a passage in some manual which appeared 

 defective, he would laughingly remark that most of what is written in 

 books is wrong. 



The illustrative lecture experiments, which he invai'iably performed 

 himself, were generally made on a small scale, were often new, always 

 strictly relevant to the matter in hand, and nevei- introduced for mere 

 sensational (effect. He paid nmch attention to these experiments, and 

 after the table had ])een set in order foi- th(^ particular lecture ))v the 

 assistant, he would regularly spend half an hour, sometimes an hour, 

 in convincing himself that all was in readiness and in rehearsing any 

 experiment al)out the success of which he was not perfectly cei'tain. 



He used few notes, but it was his habit to wi'ite uj) any numerical 

 data in small figures on the black])oard, and to refresh his memory 

 with these when needed. When 1 attended the lectures in the early 

 fifties, Bunsen used the notation and nomenclature of Berzelius, w^rit- 

 ing water II, and alumina Al.^. Later on. he still em})l<)yed the dualistic 

 notation, writing KOSO.,, HOSO3, for K,SO^ and H.^SO,; indeed, I 

 believe that he never adopted our modern formula^ or used (yannizzaro's 

 atoniicw(Mghts. although hisdeteiinination of the atomic h<'at of indium 

 and his work on ca\siuui and rul)idium were amongst the most impor- 

 tant contributions toward the settlement of those weights. 



Bunsen did not enlarge in his lectures on theoretical (juestions; 

 indeed, to discuss points of theory was not his ha))it, and not nuich to 

 his liking. His mind was eminently practical; he often used to say 

 that one chemical fact properly established was worth more than all 

 the theories one could invent. And yet he did much to establish the 

 evidence upon which our modern theories rest. 



On this ])()int the following statement, for which 1 am indebted to 

 Dr. Gibson, who worked with Bunsen from 1873 to 1875, is of interest: 



"■ What was impressed " in Bunsen's lectures ''" was not so much the 

 theories concerning the elements and their compounds as the salient 

 facts. The properties and behavior of the elements were described 

 with a clearness and w^ealth of experimental illustration that made their 



