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Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
Although in physical science there are no national frontiers, still we 
may expect that the life and achievements of a distinguished investigator 
will be of special interest to his countrymen. This consideration moved 
me to offer my paper on the life and chemical work of Archibald Scott 
Couper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and I had the pleasure of 
seeing it accepted. 
Couper ’s three short papers from the Comptes rendus de VAcademie des 
Sciences have been reprinted here. Couper published his paper on salicylic 
acid also in English in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal , adding 
his new structural formulae for the derivatives of salicylic acid prepared by 
him. He gave a full account of his new chemical theory in a paper in the 
London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine, and at the same 
time published a French translation of this paper, with some additions, in 
the Annales de chimie et de physique . I have thought it convenient to 
print the papers on salicylic acid and the two full accounts of the new 
chemical theory in both languages, on alternate pages, so as to facilitate 
reference. 
I am hopeful that this unambitious paper may conduce to place the 
memory of Archibald Scott Couper in its right place in the history of our 
science, and I thank the Royal Society of Edinburgh for the way in which 
it has met my endeavour to do this. Richard Anschutz. 
In the history of the development which organic chemistry (or the 
chemistry of the compounds of carbon) underwent in consequence of the 
introduction of the hypothesis of the quadrivalence of carbon and the 
concatenation of carbon atoms, we meet alongside of the conspicuous name 
of Friedrich August Kekule that of Archibald Scott Couper. 
But Couper had to submit to the hard fortune that his paper “ On a 
New Chemical Theory” was, owing to no fault of his, published too late. 
It is true that this paper is referred to in chemical history books, but 
Couper himself fell so completely out of memory that I have not been able 
to find his name in any of the dictionaries of scientific biography. 
As Couper’s three papers appeared for the first time, soon after one 
another, in the Comptes rendus Jtebdomadaires des seances de VAcademie 
des Sciences , many chemists seem to have taken him for a Frenchman, 
although his Christian name “ Archibald ” * points to Scotland, which is 
indeed his native land. 
* In the Comptes rendus the name is given as A. Couper ; in the Annales de chim. et de 
phys. as A. S. Conper. 
