230 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VII. No. 164> 



The recent death of Professor A. Joly, 

 director of the chemical laboratory of the 

 Ecole Normale Superieure and professor in 

 the Paris Faculty of Sciences, deserves 

 more than passing mention. His early 

 work was as an assistant in the laboratory 

 of Sainte-Claire Deville, and later he be- 

 came sub-director of the Ecole Normale 

 laboratory under Debray, whom he suc- 

 ceeded. His first published work (1875-7) 

 was on columbium and tantalum, in which 

 he added much to our knowledge of these 

 rare elements, formed synthetically several 

 of the rare columbium minerals, and proved 

 the non-existence of Marignac's ilmenium. 

 His next work (1882-7) was on the general 

 and thermal chemistry of the acids of 

 phosphorus and arsenic, among the points 

 touched upon being the relations of these 

 acids and baric acid to indicators. No less 

 than twenty-four papers, mostly published 

 in the Comptes Rendus, belong to this period. 

 It was at this time, too, that he made a 

 study of the carbid of boron, as he had 

 earlier that of columbium, and carried 

 this work as far as was possible till the in- 

 troduction of Moissan's electrical fur- 

 nace. 



Joly's most important work dates from 

 1888, when he entered upon the study of 

 the rarer elements of the platinum group, 

 beginning, in conjunction with Debray, 

 upon the oxids of ruthenium. Potassium 

 ruthenate and perruthenate were for the 

 first time obtained in a pure and crystallized 

 condition ; the supposed tetrachlorid of 

 ruthenium of Glaus, having an analogous 

 formula to that of the chlorids of the other 

 platinum metals, was shown to be not EuCl^, 

 but EuCljNO, a nitroso-chlorid, in which 

 the NO group acts in the place of a halo- 

 gen atom ; several new series of ruthenium 

 ammonium bases were formed, among them 

 one derived from the nitroso-chlorid — 



' ruthenium red ' — which possesses wonder- 

 ful tinctorial powers, closely resembling an 

 organic dyestufif. It has been used in his- 

 tology and bacteriology, and is said to be 

 the ' only reagent for the products of trans- 

 formation of pectic compounds. ' 



In other papers the constitution of osmi- 

 amic acid of Fritsche and Strure was at last 

 cleared up, it proving to be a nitroso com- 

 pound ; the double nitrites of the platinum 

 metals were studied, and their action when 

 decomposed by heat ; and a new method 

 was devised for separating the platinum 

 metals. Atomic weight determinations of 

 ruthenium, iridium and palladium were 

 made, the first being particularly valuable, 

 as there had been no work on this since 

 that of Glaus, and Joly's determination 

 brought ruthenium into its proper place in 

 the periodic table. By means of the elec- 

 tric furnace Joly was enabled for the first 

 time to obtain ruthenium and osmium in a 

 coherent state and to study the properties 

 of the fused metals. 



Altogether in his less than a'quarter of a 

 century of work Joly published about sixty 

 papers, a number of the later ones in con- 

 junction with Vezes and Leidie. He was 

 the author of numerous articles in the En- 

 cyclopedic Chimique (Dunod), and the au- 

 thor of a number of text-books, which have 

 been through several editions : Elemensde 

 chimie ; Cours 616mentaire de chimie et de 

 manipulations chimiques, 3 vols ; and Cours 

 eiementaire de chimie (notation atomique), 

 3 vols. Professor Joly was one of the rela- 

 tively few chemists whose lives have been 

 devoted to inorganic chemistry, and who, 

 working over and clearing up old fields once 

 passed over but yet little explored, rather 

 than penetrating into wholly unknown re- 

 gions, has thereby served to put chemistry 

 on a firmer basis. Dead at only fifty-one 

 years of age, he can be ill spared. 



Jas. Lewis Howe. 



