TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION B. 587 



chairs, or at any rate took a back seat beside enthusiasm for evening classes and 

 faith in the efticacy of that mysterious panacea ' technical instruction.' It is 

 indeed lamentable to think of the Taluable years of productive work lost to the 

 country through so much of the energy of these early professors having been 

 sacrificed to these veritable fetishes of our would-be educational reformers. 



Notwithstanding the unfavourable conditions under which most of these 

 university colleges had in the first instance to carry on work, it was not long 

 before they showed that they were to become, even during the tenure of office of 

 their first professors, important centres for the prosecution of research — at least 

 as far as chemical science was concerned. Owens College had indeed already 

 led the way in this matter before the period with which I am more especially 

 concerned to-day, for there the first professor of chemistry had pursued his 

 memorable investigations on the organo-metallic compounds, and had, within the 

 first five years after the foundation of the College, enunciated that generalisation 

 which was subsequently extended into the laio of valency ; whilst under his suc^ 

 ceasors, Sir Henry Roscoe, Schorlemmer, Harold Dixon, and Perkin, jun., the Owens 

 College has become perhaps the largest and best equipped school of scientiflo 

 chemistry in the British Islands. 



From the Yorkshire College, Leeds, opened in 1875, there proceeded imme- 

 diately in rapid succession that whole series of careful investigations relating 

 more especially to specific volume and other physical constants which we associate 

 with its first chemical professor, Thorpe, and his coadjutors. 



In the west of England, where the University College of Bristol was opened 

 in 1876, the chair of chemistry was first occupied by the man who has so recently 

 once more proved to the world that there are discoveries made in these islands 

 which for striking originality and independence are unsurpassed and hardly 

 equalled elsewhere. It was during his tenure of the chair at Bristol that 

 Ramsay, assisted by his able fellow-worker and successor Sidney Young, carried 

 out those important and most laborious investigations on vapour pressure and 

 the thermal properties of liquids which not only displayed his extraordinary 

 fertility and resource as an experimenter, but also revealed that exceptional 

 freshness of mind which has enabled him to discern new methods of attacking 

 problems that have already engaged the attention of many able men before 

 him. 



Turning from the west of England to the Midlands, where, in 1880, there was 

 founded, through the private munificence of the late Sir Josiah Mason, a college 

 bearing his name, which, before even attaining its majority, was transformed at 

 the psychological moment, as by the wand of the magician, into tbe University of 

 Birmingham. The first professor of chemistry at the Mason College, my dis- 

 tinguished predecessor, Tilden, soon made opportunity there to continue those 

 early researches on the terpenes with which his name will always be associated. 

 We find him also further elaborating the important uses as a reagent of nitrosyl 

 chloride, which he had a number of years previously shown how to prepare in a 

 state of purity, and which has played a somewhat similar part in the exploration 

 of the terpene hydrocarbons that phenylhydrazine has done in the elucidation of 

 the sugar-group. In addition to these investigations we find Tilden at Birming- 

 ham also turning his attention to some of the phenomena attending the solution of 

 salts. The younger men attached to the Mason College also found there the oppor- 

 tunity of enriching chemical science with the results of notable investigations; for 

 do we not all remember Thomas Turner's valuable contributions to our Iniow- 

 ledge of the influence of chemical composition on the physical and mechanical 

 properties of cast iron ? Whilst early amongst those detailed investigations on 

 the phenomena of solution, which in recent years have had such far-reaching 

 eifects on the development of our science, must be mentioned Dr. Nicol's experi- 

 paents on the volume changes attending the mixture of salt solutions, and on 

 the molecular volume, the boiling-point, and expansion of such solutions. 



In the bleak north-east of our island, at Dundee, Avhere a college was founded 

 in 1882 with an extremely handsome endowment by members of the Baxter 

 family, the first profe.ssor of chemistry, Carnelley, fired by that restless and almogt 



