7G MARTIN 



umberland, Pa.; where all the chemists of the United States 

 gathered at the home of Priestley and his descendants, to cele- 

 brate the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of oxygen gas. 



After ten years at Hartford, where Dr. Bolton left his per- 

 manent impress in the formation of a notable collection of min- 

 erals for Trinity College, he resigned and returned to New 

 York. It is characteristic of his generous nature, that he left 

 that position with the expression that, being possessed of inde- 

 pendent means, he did not feel that he ought to retain the place 

 of a salaried professor, so desirable for some other worker in 

 science not favored with his resources. Let no one imagine 

 from this that he sought for ease and leisure. No man was 

 ever a more tireless worker ; his fertile brain and his all-around 

 scholarship could brook no respite. He simply gave himself 

 to other lines of scientific acivity, which he made peculiarly 

 his own. 



He had become especially impressed with the difficulties pre- 

 sented to the chemical investigator by the vast and ever-increas- 

 ing body of literature in that and in allied departments, in many 

 languages, and scattered through a multitude of journals, trans- 

 actions and periodicals. This he sought to relieve by some 

 form of systematic recording ; and after conducting a series of 

 investigations of great care and beauty upon fluorescent bodies, 

 and particularly the uranium compounds, for which he had 

 gathered and collected all that had appeared on these subjects, 

 he published in the Annals of the Lyceum his " Index to the 

 Literature of Uranium," in 1870. This was the first of a series 

 of such indexes to the entire literature of single elements and 

 of special topics in chemistry, which have now become very 

 numerous and of indispensable utility. Dr. Bolton presented 

 this subject to the Section of Chemistry of the American Asso- 

 ciation for the Advancement of Science, and in 1882 secured the 

 appointment of a permanent committee of that body on the 

 indexing of chemical literature. Of this committee he was the 

 ever-active chairman ; and the annual reports of progress for 

 over twenty years indicate the growth and the scope of the work 

 that he had thus inaugurated and carried on. 



