10 
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
III. — Notices of Fellows, Honorary and Ordinary, recently 
deceased. By The General Secretary. 
Adolf Ritter von Baeyer was born on October 31, 1835, in Berlin. His 
interest in chemistry began at the early age of nine, when his father gave 
him a copy of Stockhardt’s Schule der Chemie. Subsequently he studied 
under Bunsen at Heidelberg, and also under Kekule, whom he followed to 
Ghent, and whom he always considered to be his real teacher. In 1860 he 
returned to Berlin, and became Privatdozenten at that University. From 
this day onwards he published numerous papers. After three years spent in 
Strassburg as Professor of Chemistry he finally settled at Munich, where most 
of his chemical researches reached maturity. The influence Baeyer exerted 
in the development of chemical science, and especially of organic chemistry, 
was greater probably than that of any other single man, for almost every 
professor of chemistry now in Germany passed through his laboratories at 
Munich and received a stimulus there from the enthusiastic head. 
He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 
in 1900, and died in August 1917, in his eighty-second year. 
Jean Gaston Darboux was born at Nimes on August 13, 1842. In 
1861 he headed the lists for admission to the Ecole Polytechnique and to 
the Ecole Normale. At the latter institution he showed his bent towards 
geometry, and in a few years was publishing memoirs on Orthogonal 
Surfaces. After filling various teaching posts of importance, he became, 
in 1880, Professor of “ Geometrie superieure,” and proved himself a 
worthy successor of Chasles. His great treatise on The General Theory of 
Surfaces was published in four volumes between 1887 and 1896. He was 
elected a member of the Academie des Sciences in 1884, and in 1900 was 
chosen Secretaire perpetuel. 
He was elected an Honorary Fellow of our Society in 1902, and of 
the Royal Society of London in 1900; and received in 1916 from the 
Royal Society of London the award of the Sylvester Medal. He died in 
February 1917. 
Walter E. Archer, C.B., was born in 1855. In 1884 he acquired the 
fishing rights of the Sands River, Norway, where, by his researches into 
the life-history of the salmon, he began the work with which he was 
closely associated throughout his life. In 1892 he was appointed Inspector 
