108 SIR WILLIAM RAMSAY 



kind of system. The first laboratory opened for this 

 purpose was at Bloomsbury Square on the premises 

 still occupied by the Pharmaceutical Society. Almost 

 immediately after this, in 1845, the Royal College of 

 Chemistry was founded and A. W. Hofmann was the 

 first professor. At the former institution the first 

 operations in which the student was engaged consisted 

 in preparing and crystallising a number of metallic salts 

 and other compounds. In a few weeks or months he 

 was instructed in qualitative and simple quantitative 

 analysis. At the College of Chemistry, on the other 

 hand, the whole of the first year was occupied with 

 qualitative analysis. The second year was devoted to 

 quantitative analysis and the student was then allowed 

 for the first time to engage in making preparations, which 

 business was always associated with some kind of 

 research. This was the order usually adopted in the 

 great majority of laboratories on the continent as well 

 as in this country during the next thirty years or more, 

 and was probably the system practically at work in the 

 chemical laboratories at University College when Wil- 

 liamson resigned and Ramsay succeeded him. Other 

 teachers have advocated the introduction of the student 

 to methods of research from the outset, but as science 

 has progressed very far since the middle of the nineteenth 

 century there are not only the transformations and 

 extensions of theory to be considered, but the material, 

 apparatus and methods used in the modern laboratory 

 are far more complicated than those of fifty years ago. 



