1884.] Treasurer's Address. 429 



science. Two were residents at Paris, both of whom had Chairs in the 

 French Academy, of which the one had been since 1868 one of the 

 Permanent Secretaries. I cannot dwell upon the discoveries and the 

 remarkable career of M. Jean Baptiste Andre Dumas, whose energy and 

 perspicuity even when past the limit of fourscore years, all those who 

 of late have had the opportunity of being present at a meeting of the 

 French Academy must have found reason to admire. An appre- 

 ciative memoir of him by one of our own Fellows, who of all men 

 living is perhaps the best qualified to judge of the value of his 

 labours Professor Hofmann written while Dumas was still among 

 us, will be found in the pages of " Nature,"* and a biographical 

 notice by the same hand has appeared in our own " Proceedings." 

 It will give some slight idea of the extent of time over which the 

 labours of M. Dumas have extended if I mention that, so long ago as 

 in 1843, he received the Copley Medal at ur hands, at a time when his 

 chemical and physiological researches had already extended over a 

 period of twenty-two years. M. Dumas died at Cannes on the llth 

 of April last, and among the most touching of the speechea at his 

 obsequies was that of M. Wiirtz, whose own decease took place on 

 the 12th of the following month. 



Although nearly twenty years younger than M. Dumas, M. Karl 

 Adolph Wiirtz had for a long time been one of the most distinguished 

 leaders of modern chemical science, especially in the department of 

 organic chemistry, and his merits were recognised by this Society in 

 1864, when he was elected one of our foreign members, and again in 

 1881, when the Copley Medal was awarded to him. 



The third chemist on the foreign list whom we have lost is our 

 Davy Medallist, Professor Kolbe, whose sudden death took place only 

 ^on Wednesday last, and of whose merits I shall have to say a few 

 words later on. 



Among our English Fellows was a contemporary of Wiirtz, who, 

 like him, had been a pupil of the illustrious Liebig, but whose bent 

 was more on the practical than on the theoretical side of chemistry 

 I mean Dr. Angus Smith, whose official labours in favour of pure air 

 and pure water combined both tact and zeal, and were productive of 

 highly beneficial results. 



One other chemist has been taken from among us,, Mr. Henry 

 Watts, the well-known editor of the " Dictionary of Chemistry," and 

 of more than one issue of " Fownes's Manual." 



Our other losses extend over various departments of science. In 

 botany our ranks are thinned by the death of Dr. John Hutton 

 Balfour, formerly Professor of Botany at Glasgow and the Emeritus 

 Professor of that Chair in the University of Edinburgh ; and of the 



* " Proc. Roy. Soc.," vol. xxxviii, x. " Nature,' vol. xxi, February 6, 1880. 



2 F 2 



