A GEEAT CHEMIST: SIR WILLIAM RAMSAY.^ 
By Ch. Moureu. 
Although the progress of science is continuous, it is neither uni- 
foiTn nor regular. From time to time this progress is suddenly 
accelerated, leaving strewn along the route the successive bounds, 
and creating thus a sort of discontinuity in the continuity. These 
sudden forward leaps are the work of a small number of geniuses 
whose discoveries guide the countless efforts of experimenters. When 
Dalton conceived the atomic hypothesis, he opened up and made 
fertile the entire domain of chemistry. When Davy isolated the 
alkaline metals he revealed to astonished chemists a whole new world. 
The idea of chemical function, the law of substitution, the law of 
the homology, the atomic theory, are fundamental additions to 
knowledge derived from the works of Dumas, Laurent, and Gerhardt, 
who have transformed and rejuvenated chemistrj'^, opening to it 
wider horizons. In opening synthesis as a channel for organic 
chemistry, Berthelot rolled back its frontiers immeasurably. It is in 
the ranks of these great chemists, worthy followers of Lavoisier and 
of Priestley, that belongs the brilliant investigator, the fertile in- 
ventor, the hardy pioneer whose work, so deeply original, and whose 
powerful personality, the counselor of the Chemical Society has 
given me the flattering mission of reviewing before you. 
The name of Sir William Ramsay calls to mind at once, with all 
their meaning, two capital discoveries, to some extent paradoxical: 
On the one hand, the existence in the atmospheric air of a series of 
gaseous elements, which their chemical inertness relegates to the very 
borderland of chemistry ; on the other hand, the production of one 
of these gases, helium, by the spontaneous disintegration of the 
radium atom, two classes of facts essentially new and of fundamental 
importance, whose discovery was possible only to an investigator of 
the highest rank, capable through exceptional ability, natural or 
acquired, of bringing light into the darkness of the unlaiown. 
Of Scotch origin — he was born in Glasgow in 1852 — Ramsay's 
hereditary influences were most favorable. In his family were chem- 
ists and doctors of note, and one of his uncles. Sir Andrew Ramsay, 
was a well-known geologist. Thus, as he himself liked to recall, Ram- 
* Translated by permission from Revue Scientiflque, October, 1919. 
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