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Proceedings of the Boyal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
majority who adhered to the union with the United Presbyterian Church 
and the minority who declined to follow them into the union. His public 
services were recognised by his elevation to the peerage in 1897 under the 
title of Baron Kinnear. Before his appointment to the bench, Lord Kinnear 
was a Liberal in politics, but his tastes were more scholarly than political, 
and he took little part in political controversies. He became a Fellow of 
the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1883, and remained on the roll until 
his death, which took place on December 20, 1917. 
Edmund Albert Letts, Ph.D., F.I.C., F.C.S., was born at Sydenham, 
Kent, on August 27, 1852. He was educated at Bishop Stortford School, 
King’s College, London, and the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. In 
1872 he became chief assistant to Professor Crum Brown, University of 
Edinburgh, and four years later was appointed Professor of Chemistry, 
University College, Bristol. In 1879 he succeeded Thomas Andrews as 
Professor of Chemistry in Queen’s College, Belfast — a position which 
failing health compelled him to resign in 1917. From 1878 he communi- 
cated to this Society a series of papers on Organic Chemistry, his most 
important contribution being on Benzyl Phosphines and their Derivatives 
(vol. xxxv, Trans. R.S.E., 1889), for which he was awarded the Keith Prize. 
During his thirty -seven years’ tenure of the Chair of Chemistry at Belfast 
he devoted his attention to the question of the pollution of rivers, estuaries, 
and tidal waters. He was recognised as one of the authorities on this 
question, and, at the request of the Royal Commission on Sewage Disposal, 
Professor Letts along with Dr W. E. Adeney made an extensive survey of 
important British estuaries, and the results of their inquiry were published 
in 1908 as an Appendix to the Fifth Report of the Commission. The 
relation of the marine alga Ulva latissima to the nitrogen content of the 
water in which it grows occupied Professor Letts’s attention, and he was 
planning a full discussion of this question up to a few weeks before 
his death. 
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1874, 
and died on February 19, 1918, as the result of a cycling accident in the 
Isle of Wight. 
Kenneth John Mackenzie, M.A., was born on January 30, 1869, and 
was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and trained as a teacher in 
the Moray House Training College. He also studied advanced organic 
chemistry at Heriot Watt College, and was for five years the private 
research assistant to the Professor of Organic Chemistry. He was joint 
