180 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
k 
the fulminates and on cacodyl. His first call as Professor was to 
Ghent ; from that University he was translated to Bonn. It was 
Kekule who first gave definite form to Frankland’s conception of 
valency, and he applied this idea to carbon compounds. Out of 
the conception of valency, too, grew his theory of cyclic com- 
pounds, said to have been prolific to a degree almost unparalleled 
in the history of pure science. He died on 13th July 1896. 
Ernst Curtius was born at Lubeck in 1814, and studied at 
the College of his native town, and at the Universities of Bonn, 
Gottingen, and Berlin. In 1837, he visited Athens in company 
with Professor Brandos, in order to begin his famous researches 
into Greek antiquities. He took a leading part in archgeological 
expeditions to the Peloponnesus and Olympia. He taught for 
some time in the Colleges of Berlin, and became tutor to the 
Emperor Frederick. In 1856, he succeeded Hermann as Professor 
of Greek at Gottingen. Since 1870, he had been Director of the 
Royal Museum there. His best known works relate to Greek 
antiquities. His History of Greece has been translated into English. 
He was a Foreign Associate of the French Academy of Belles 
Lettres and Inscriptions, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of 
our Society in 1889. He died on 11th July 1896. 
Hubert Anson Newton was born in 1830, and died 12th August 
1896. His reputation is largely connected with the history of the 
November showers of meteors. His collection and discussion of the 
original accounts of thirteen meteoric displays, distributed over a 
period of more than nine hundred years, demonstrated the per- 
manent character of the phenomenon. Perhaps one is not justified 
in calling him the Director of the Yale Observatory, as he only 
held that position for two years, 1882-84; and he seems to have 
preferred the position of Secretary to the Board of Managers. The 
work that issued from the Observatory under his management, 
whether it be parallactic inquiry or stellar triangulation, placed the 
institution in the front rank of those devoted to extra-meridional 
work. I will only further allude to his inquiry into the capture of 
comets by Jupiter or other planets, in which he has shown that 
the perturbing action of the planets on parabolic orbits tends to 
produce elliptic orbits of short periods, moderately inclined to the 
ecliptic. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of this Society in 
