iv Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



Horace Brown entered on his technical career, in 1866, at the time 

 when Griess took up the position of chief chemist, at Allsopp's, vacated by 

 Dr. Bottinger, father of the Dr. H. von Bottinger, recently deceased, who is 

 noted for the part he played in the development of the German Dyestuff 

 Industry. He had been influenced, as a lad, both by Bottinger and by Griess 

 but his only didactic training in chemistry was a year spent at the Boyal 

 College of Chemistry, partly under Hofmann. and partly under Hofmann's 

 successor, Erankland. 



Cornelius O'Sullivan went to Burton in 1867. He too had been a pupil of 

 Hofmann, at the Koyal College of Chemistry ; he was one of the assistants in 

 the laboratory at the time when Horace Brown and the writer entered as 

 students. He accompanied Hofmann to Berlin but, after a few months, on 

 his recommendation, returned to England to enter the service of Messrs. Bass 

 and Co. An accomplished worker, he began the study of the mash-tun by 

 investigating the action of the enzymes of malt (diastase) on starch ; he may 

 be said to have rediscovered maltose in the course of this work and to have 

 established its significance as a fundamental unit in the complex starch 

 molecule. Although others have followed in his footsteps, to the present day 

 we remain ignorant as to the precise nature of the successive changes which 

 the starch molecule undergoes on hydrolysis and of the number of enzymes 

 concerned in the process. O'Sullivan was also the first to study, in detail, the 

 rate at which cane-sugar was hydrolysed by yeast invertase. Finally, he 

 undertook an inquiry into the products of the hydrolysis of gum-arabic and 

 laid solid foundations which no one yet has built upon. 



Adrian Brown did not enter the scientific service at Burton until 1873, 

 when its foundations had been deeply laid : he then spent several years 

 studying for the distinguished part he was to take in the quartette. 



He was born at Burton on April 27, 1852. He came of a practical and 

 nature-loving stock. His father, Edwin Brown, the son of a small builder, 

 left school at an early age, to become clerk at a private bank in Burton, 

 ultimately the Burton, Uttoxeter and Ashbourne Union Bank, of which he 

 was manager during the last twenty-five years of his life. He died suddenly, 

 in 1876, at the age of fifty-seven. He was an ardent naturalist, specially 

 known as a coleopterist, with a strong scientific bent and leanings to all the 

 sciences, particularly geology. 



He is referred to in the ' Life and Letters of Charles Darwin ' in a letter 

 from Henry Walter Bates, the celebrated Amazonian traveller, to Darwin, 

 dated October 17, 1862 :— 



" Mr. Edwin Brown is manager in a large Bank at Burton. I have 

 known him twenty-one years ; he was my earliest naturalist friend. I 

 have always looked on him as a man of extraordinary intellectual ability. 

 I have given him my notices on Carabi. He is amassing material 



