PROCEEDINGS 
OF THE 
ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH. 
YOL. XL. 1919-20. 
I. — Notices of Fellows, Honorary and Ordinary, recently 
deceased. By The General Secretary. 
Emil Fischer — the distinguished chemist — was born at Euskirchen on 
October 9, 1852. He was educated at the Bonn Gymnasium and after- 
wards at the Universities of Bonn and Strassburg. After occupying the 
Chairs of Chemistry at Munich, Erlangen, and Wurzburg, he finally 
settled in Berlin where the greater part of his far-reaching work in 
chemistry was done. He received the Davy Medal in 1890 from the Royal 
Society of London, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1902. 
He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 
in 1908, and died on July 18, 1919. 
Edward Charles Pickering was born in Boston on July 19, 1846. 
He was educated at the Boston Latin School and at PXarvard University, 
where, after graduation, he was made an instructor in mathematics. Two 
years later he was appointed Thayer Professor of Physics at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the first to establish a 
physical laboratory in the United States, and rapidly gained a high 
reputation as a scientific worker. His career may be said to have begun 
in 1869 when he accompanied the Nautical Almanac Party to observe a 
total solar eclipse. In 1876 he was appointed the Director of the Harvard 
Observatory, and a year later moved with the observatory to Cambridge, 
Mass., and assumed the duties which were to be his for forty-two 
years. Much of the work he began here has become classical, especially 
photographic magnitudes, classification of spectra, and discussion of variable 
YOL. XL. 1 
