842 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVII. No. 439. 



stincts were strong. When the decision 

 was made, however, there was no swerving 

 or faltering in the path. After gradua- 

 tion in 1869, he went to Berlin, where he 

 studied chemistry for a year with A. W. 

 Hofmann. On returning to America, he 

 was made assistant in chemistry in Har- 

 vard University, a post which he held for 

 four years. At the age of twenty-five he 

 was promoted to an assistant professor- 

 ship, and ten years afterwards became full 

 professor. The always increasing admin- 

 istrative duties of the growing department 

 of chemistry were divided on the death of 

 Professor Josiah Parsons Cooke in 1894, 

 and Profess.or Hill was given the respon- 

 sibility of the maaagement of the laboratory 

 as director, while Professor Charles Loring 

 Jackson was made chairman of the depart- 

 ment. During the nine years of his direc- 

 torship, Professor Hill, with the utmost 

 ingenuity, remodeled and enlarged an old 

 and unsuitable building with such success 

 as to provide available accommodation for 

 over seven hundred men, and to increase 

 immensely the efficiency of the institution. 

 Administrative work of this kind was un- 

 dertaken mth the conscious sacrifice of 

 some of his dearly cherished scientific 

 ideals, but no murmur of complaint escaped 

 him. The long service of thirty-three 

 years to Harvard University was unremit- 

 ting; for he never claimed the occasional 

 holiday-year which was his due. 



On September 2, 1871, he was married 

 to Miss Ellen Grace Shepard, who with 

 their son, Edward Burlingame Hill, sur- 

 vives him. In recent years their sum- 

 mers have been spent in Dublin, New 

 Hampshire, and bicycle rides thence to 

 Cambridge on laboratory business were not 

 unusual occurrences during the summer 

 months. 



The National Academy of Sciences 

 elected Professor Hill to membership as 



long ago as 1883, and he was also a fellow 

 of the American Academy of Arts and Sci- 

 ences and a member of the Washington 

 Academy and of the American and Ger- 

 man Chemical Societies. 



Professor Hill's original scientific work 

 was marked by the quality which pre- 

 eminently characterized his whole life — 

 absolute sincerity. At the outset, great 

 enthusiasm eiiabled him soon to overconie 

 the handicap of his somewhat inadequate 

 training, and ' even his first paper on 

 methyluric acid was an unusually thorough 

 and convincing piece of work. Soon after- 

 wards his fortunate discovery lof the rare 

 substance furfurol among the products 

 of the dry distillation of wood, enabled 

 him to begin its investigation ; and for 

 twenty years his best thought was given to 

 the derivatives of this substance, especially 

 to pyromueie, mucobromic and muco- 

 chloric acids. This series of investigations 

 constitutes a remarkably complete and sys- 

 tematic whole, raising a large groiap of 

 substances from a position of oblivion to 

 one of commanding importance. Later 

 his discovery of nitromalonic aldehyde led 

 him to a number of interesting syntheses 

 of the benzol ring ; and last winter he was 

 engaged in the study of derivatives of 

 pyrazol, another ring-structure. 



An acute sense of the responsibility of 

 publication was always in his mind; ac- 

 cordingly his words were carefully 

 weighed, and unusually free from misstate- 

 ments. Work done by students was always 

 repeated with his own hands before publi- 

 cation—instead of being tested only here 

 and there, after the manner of most chem- 

 ists. His remarkable lectures on organic 

 chemistry were noticeable for the same ad- 

 mirable completeness; they presented a 

 finely balanced and comprehensive view of 

 the subject. In these lectures he occasion- 

 ally expressed theoretical views of his own 



