1 80  Correspondence.  { Am^r;Sarm- 
I  am  reminded  that  it  is  twenty-seven  years  ago  this  month 
since  Professor  Procter  passed  away,  and  as  a  member  of  the  class 
before  which  he  delivered  his  last  course  of  lectures,  it  may  be  of 
interest  to  mention  that  as  I  write  from  this  distant  city  I  have 
before  me,  carefully  preserved,  my  student  notes  of  the  lecture  on 
pharmacy  which  he  delivered  on  the  eve  of  his  death,  dated  Febru- 
ary 9,  1874.  The  subject  of  that  lecture  was  "  Animal  Substances," 
and  it  included  the  consideration  of  gelatin,  milk,  the  preparation 
of  lactic  acid  and  lactates,  albumen,  cod  liver  oil  and  pepsin.  As 
Secretary  of  the  Class  Society  I  was  also  commissioned  to  convey 
to  the  family  of  Professor  Procter  the  resolutions  of  sympathy 
which  my  fellow-students  had  adopted  on  the  occasion  of  his  death. 
The  recalling  of  these  incidents  after  such  a  considerable  lapse  of 
time  may  serve  to  explain  the  special  interest  which  I  feel,  and 
which  I  know  to  be  shared  by  one  of  my  classmates,  Henry  S. 
Wellcome,  for  many  years  resident  in  London,  in  the  success  of  the 
project  under  consideration. 
With  regard  to  the  form  of  memorial,  it  may  be  well  to  con- 
sider in  the  first  place  what  Professor  Procter  would  himself  have 
wished,  and  secondly,  what  is  feasible  to  accomplish.  The  work  of 
Professor  Procter  was,  to  a  large  extent,  that  of  a  pioneer,  and,  in 
my  opinion,  his  memory  and  the  influence  he  exerted  as  a  teacher 
and  investigator  could  not  be  more  fittingly  and  more  usefully  per- 
petuated than  by  the  foundation  of  a  scholarship  to  be  known  by 
his  name.  If  a  fund  sufficiently  large  for  this  purpose  could  be 
realized,  which,  unfortunately,  is  somewhat  doubtful,  it  should  be 
held  in  trust  by  the  American  Pharmaceutical  Association,  and  the 
interest  applied  for  the  higher  scientific  education  at  one  of  the 
leading  American  or  foreign  universities,  during  a  period  of  at  least 
two  years,  of  such  a  graduate  student  of  pharmacy  as  might  be 
found,  by  a  competitive  examination  conducted  by  a  committee  of 
the  Association,  properly  qualified  and  otherwise  worthy  of  receiv- 
ing the  specified  grant.  The  value  of  such  a  benefaction  would 
naturally  not  remain  confined  to  the  individual  recipient  of  it,  but 
might  reasonably  be  expected  to  exert  the  same  ever-widening 
influence  on  scientific  progress  as  the  life  and  work  of  the  one  it 
serves  to  commemorate.  The  details  of  the  conditions  by  which  it 
would  seem  desirable  that  such  a  scheme  should  be  governed  for 
the  attainment  of  the  best  results  need  not  be  further  considered 
now. 
