AT THE UNIVEKSITY 49 



In turning to the physical side of chemistry, I believe he was 

 greatly influenced by Dr. E. J. Mills, who then held the ' Young ' 

 Chair of Technical Chemistry in Anderson's College (now the 

 Royal Technical College), Glasgow, and of whom he saw a great 

 deal about this time. Mills was then engaged in the study of 

 mass action and elective attraction. Ramsay was greatly 

 interested in this work and used often to talk to me about it. 

 Another thing which certainly influenced him was Guldberg and 

 Waage' s work, which was only then becoming generally known 

 in this country. When we were in Norway together in 1879 we 

 tried to see Waage, but he was then on holiday. Ramsay, how- 

 ever, saw him the following year. 1 His first important research 

 in physical chemistry was on the volumes of liquids at their 

 boiling points, 2 but I cannot recall the exact circumstances under 



1 Extract from a letter from Bristol, dated 28th September, 1880 : 



" I called on Waage and he asked me to spend an afternoon with him 

 at his country house about half an hour's sail from the town. We had 

 a long chat about things in general. He has given up his experiments on 

 chemical statics. He speaks a little German, and with my knowledge of 

 Norse, which as you know is surpassed by few and equalled by none of the 

 natives of that country, we got along very well. He is great on the liquor 

 question, and nothing would satisfy him but that we should hammer out 

 a letter together to Gladstone, asking him to tax heavy beers with a pro- 

 portionately higher alcoholic tax. I saw afterwards that the People's 

 William thought it a good suggestion." 



It would perhaps be proper to mention, for the information of the general 

 reader, that Peter Waage was Professor of Chemistry in the University of 

 Christiania. His fame rests on the thesis published by him jointly with 

 his brother-in-law Guldberg, Professor of Mathematics, in which the 

 fundamentally important principle, known as the " Law of Mass Action," 

 is developed. Waage was born in 3833 and died in January 1900. A 

 notice of his life and work will be found in the Transactions of the Chemical 

 Society for 1900 (p. 591) from the pen of Ramsay himself. 



2 In the Autobiography Ramsay accounts for the origin of his interest 

 in physico-chemical problems by reference to difficulties he encountered 

 in determining the vapour densities of certain derivatives of dipyridine. 

 Having used Victor Meyer's air-expulsion method, the idea occurred to him 

 that the molecular volume of liquids at their boiling point could be deter- 

 mined by heating a glass bulb of known capacity, containing the substance, 

 in its own vapour. " Once launched on the ocean of physical chemistry," 

 he says, " numerous problems presented themselves." 



D 



