io4 



NA TURE 



{May 29, 1884 



alcohol, then spoke of the diatomic alcohols or glycols ; 

 but no one in the audience could have guessed that it was 

 he who first gave an accurate interpretation to Berthelot's 

 results, and that he followed up and confirmed his gene- 

 ralisation by the brilliant discovery of the glycols. 



I cite but two cases out of many, for during the whole 

 of his course Wurtz never alluded to one of his dis- 

 coveries as being his own ; and certainly from his own 

 lectures his large audiences at the Sorbonne could have 

 had no idea of the leading part he played in tin ■■■ m 

 development of modern organic chemistry. 

 t Having already exercised his immense influence at the 

 Ecole de Medecine, he felt himself at too great a distance 

 from his auditors at the Sorbonne, and while he was 

 having a laboratory (still unfinished) built for him, he in- 

 augurated last year a series of weekly conferences ' under 

 his own direction, which might well find their analogues 

 in the English Universities. Each week M. Wurtz gave 

 out two subjects (such as molecular weights, the paraffins, 

 the ethers, &c), and two students volunteered to give lec- 

 tures (lasting from half an hour to three-quarters of an 

 hour) on them the wee 1 .; following. The conferences were 

 delivered in one of the large lecture-rooms to audiences 

 of from sixty to eight}- students ; Wurtz himself 

 end of the lecture-table and gave a kindly and helpful 

 criticism after the conference was oxer. The last ol these 

 conferences was given jusl thre< 1 ago by the writer 

 of these lines, and M. Wurtz's kind words will always be 

 is memory to him : — they were the last he was 

 destined to utter in publii . 



Wurtz was a fine man, of commanding presence. To 

 alleviate the organic disease from which he suffi 

 from which he died, he began by his doctor's orders to 

 work at gymnastics about ten ind he was, not- 



withstanding his sixty-six years, an accomplished gymnast 

 at the time of his death. The untiring activity of his 

 mind appeared in a certain vivacity and restlessness of 

 manner peculiar to himself; but one frit, as soon as one 

 saw and spoke to him, that he was a straightforward, 

 loyal-hearted gentleman. 



M. Wurtz was followed to the grave not only by the official 

 deputations from the Senat, the Institut, and the various 

 learned institutions with which he was connected, but also 

 by hundreds of students, principally from the Ecole de 

 Medecine and the Faculte des Sciences, bearing, accord- 

 ing to French custom, wreaths of flowers, and thus paid 

 1 l tribute to the memory of their loved master. 

 One could not help noticing especially an immense wreath 

 of white flowers, offered by the women-students of the 

 Faculte' de Medecine, as a testimony of their gratitude to 

 the man who some fifteen years ago obtained permission 

 for them to study in the Faculty, and whom they followed 

 to his last resting place right across Paris from the 

 Boulevard St. Germain to the cemetery of Pere la Chaise. 



The sympathy which M. Wurtz inspired in all with 

 whom he came in contact, coupled with his great genius, 

 gave him a personal influence beyond that of most men — 

 for if he is dead to us in the body he is still living in the 

 mind, aye, and in the hearts, of the thousands of students 

 who have listened to him in rapt attention on the 

 benches of the Ecole de Medicine and of the Sorbonne. 

 As he said of Dumas : Forma nn-utis eeterna. 



Paris, May 16 



ROBERT AXGU.S SMITH 

 A NOTHER of the men of the middle time has passed 

 -'*■ away. Early on Monday morning, the I2th inst., 

 whilst Adolphc Wurtz lay dying at Paris, Angus Smith 

 breathed his last at Glynwood, Colwyn Pay. Both men 

 were of the same age, and both were pupils of the illus- 

 trious Liebig — students in the great chemical school of 

 Giessen. Each, in a sense, was imbued with some one 



1 I need hardly say all University lectures are quite free in France. 



phase of the spirit of their many-sided master, but in a 

 different manner : Wurtz spent his energies and won his 

 greatest triumphs in the development of chemical theory, 

 and in the elucidation of the structure of organic com- 

 pounds ; Smith had probably little knowledge of, and 

 but little sympathy with, the theories of modern organic 

 chemistry ; and although possessed of his countrymen's 

 love of metaphysics, and, as his writings show, capable of 

 much abstract speculation, his conceptions of chemical 

 constitution were probably, in the main, as mechanical 

 as those of Dalton, whose disciple and chief interpreter 

 he considered himself to be. His chief point of contact 

 with Liebig lay in his recognition of the utilitarian side of 

 his science : for upwards of forty years he laboured un- 

 ceasingly to show how chemistry might minister to the 

 material comfort and physical well-being of men — not in 

 the manufacture of new compounds useful in the arts, or 

 in the establishment of new industries, — but in raising 

 the general standard of the health of communities by 

 checking or counteracting the evils which have followed 

 in the train of that enormous development of the manu- 

 facturing arts which is the boast of this century. Sweet- 

 ness and light were fixed articles in Smith's creed. His 

 love of fresh air, of pure water, of a green hillside was 

 intense. "Where to, sir?" asked a cabdriver whom 

 Smith had hailed on his way home, tired and longing for 

 escape from beneath the dull, murky Manchester sky. 

 " 1" the sun ! " was the answer. And we are told that it 

 was to the credit of that cabman that he did not take the 

 old philosopher to some hostelry with the sign of Phcebus, 

 but trundled him among the green lanes beyond the city's 

 outskirts until it was time to turn the horse's head home- 

 wards. To keep the air in our towns fresh and whole- 

 some, to restore the water of our streams to its pristine 

 clearness, to preserve the freshness and verdure of the 

 fields and woods, to sweeten the atmosphere of the 

 crowded dwellings in cities, — this was the kind of work 

 to which Smith dedicated his life, and at which he 

 laboured to the very last. There have been greater 

 chemists, no doubt ;, his name is not associated with any 

 fundamental discovery in chemistry, and his attempts at 

 theorising were not always very happy ; but in his true 

 vocation, as the chemist of sanitary science, Smith 

 worked alone, and we have yet to find the man on whom 

 his mantle has fallen. 



Robert Angus Smith was born in the neighbourhood ot 

 iw on February 15, 1N17. When nine years of 

 age, he was sent to the High School, and at thirteen he 

 1 the University of Glasgow. He quickly showed 

 that liking for the classics, and especially for Greek, which 

 clung to him through life, and his mother, as usual among 

 Scottish matrons, cherished the aspiration that her son 

 should " wag his pow in a poopit." Whether this ambi- 

 tion was ever shared by her son is doubtful ; at all events, 

 such a career became impossible for Smith alter hearing 

 the preaching of Campbell of Row: he declared that he 

 could not take " holy orders in a kirk which had expelled 

 a man for being apparently both wiser and better than 

 itself." On leaving the University he acted as tutor in 

 various families in the Highlands and in London. What 

 directed him towards science does not appear. In com- 

 pany with his brother John, who is known as the inventor 

 of a chromoscope, and as the author of some speculations 

 on the cause of colour and the nature of light, he had read 

 the standard works of his time on natural philosophy and 

 chemistry. When twenty-two years of age he found him- 

 self at Giessen, and after working under Liebig for some 

 time he obtained his doctorate. He returned to England 

 in 1S41, and procured employment under Dr., now Sir 

 Lyon, Playfair, in connection with the Plealth of Towns 

 Commission. It was this circumstance which doubtless 

 served to fix the direction of his future work. His earliest 

 publication — a contribution to the then recently founded 

 Chemical Society of London — was a paper on the air and 



