AT THE UNIVERSITY 45 



doing the work till lie was appointed professor at Bristol 

 in 1879. 



In 1874 Ferguson succeeded Anderson in the Chair 

 of Chemistry and he appointed Ramsay to the post of 

 Tutorial Assistant. His duties consisted in holding 

 classes to amplify the lectures. There were about two 

 hundred, chiefly medical, students, attending the chemi- 

 cal lectures, and these were divided into four groups, 

 and these had to be " coached " by individual question 

 and answer and weekly written exercises. Each group 

 came to the class twice a week and the consequence 

 was that the teacher learned inorganic chemistry very 

 thoroughly, but the work was monotonous and at the 

 end of the six years in which he was thus engaged it 

 was felt to be exhausting. But he gave some lectures on 

 organic chemistry, which afforded some stimulus and led 

 him to undertaking, though usually alone, some research 

 in the laboratory, for at that time no one worked 

 independently, except a few students whom he had per- 

 suaded. Among these were Arthur Smithells, now 

 Professor in the University of Leeds, and J. J. Dobbie, 

 afterwards Professor in Bangor and now Director of the 

 Government Laboratory in London. As a result he 

 published a notice of a new mineral, bismuthous tesseral 

 pyrites, and a paper on the action of heat on sodium 

 ethylthiosulphate. The cellars of the chemical labora- 

 tory contained the collection of pyridine bases left by 

 Professor Anderson. Eamsay obtained possession of 

 these and proceeded to their investigation. The fraction 



