.ii Annual Report of the Council. 



Dr. Debus. F.R.S. — By the death of Dr. Heinrich Debus, 

 chemical science loses an able investigator and the Society one 

 of its oldest honorary members. He was born in Hessen in 

 1824 so that he had reached the advanced age of 91 when he 

 died on December 9th, 1915. Dr. Debus studied chemistry 

 under Bunsen at the Polytechnic School at Cassel and followed 

 him to Marburg There he met Kolbe and Frankland, with 

 whom he became veiy intimate, and there he investigated the 

 chemistry of madder which formed the subject of his first 

 paper, published in 184S. In 1851 he came to England and 

 taught Chemistry at Queenwood College, Hampshire, and later 

 at Clifion College. He left Clifton in 1870 on his appointment 

 as lecturer on Chemistry at Guy's Hospital, where he remained 

 till elected first professor of Chemistry in the newly established 

 Naval College at Greenwich. This was his last appointment 

 and when he resigned it he returned to Germany. 



Dr. Debus was a voluminous writer and communicated 

 many papers on a great variety of subjects to the scientific 

 journals. Perhaps his most important papers were those on the 

 chemical theory of gunpowder and on the oxidation products of 

 ethyl alcohol, glycol, and glycerine. He showed that the action 

 of nitric acid on alcohol yielded acetic, formic, oxalic and 

 glycollic acids, and in addition a new acid which he named 

 glyoxylic acid. After the discovery ot glycol by Wurtz in 1S59 

 he showed that this new body also yielded glyoxylic acid on 

 oxidation. 



Dr. Debus joined the Chemical Society in 1859 and later 

 became a Vice-President. He was elected a Fellow of the 

 Royal Society in 1861. 



To a wide knowledge of chemistry Dr. Debus added a deep 

 interest in other scientific subjects. He was an excellent teacher 

 and had the faculty for interesting his students by whom he- was 

 greatly esteemed. He never married and outlived nearly all his 

 scientific contemporaries, but will be remembered in the annals 

 of chemistry for the important additions he made to the progress 

 of that science. 1* • T- 



