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MONG the eminent men of England whose names are closely associated with the contemporary progress of chemical science that of Dr. Frankland has a distinguished place. Having a genius for the theoretical and speculative side of his favorite subject, together with a thorough and comprehensive discipline in experimental operations, he has devoted himself with equal zeal and success to pure chemistry, to its physical relations, and to its large applications to public and sanitary questions which depend for their elucidation upon chemical knowledge. Eminent also as a teacher and an organizer of research, and occupying many positions of responsibility, he has exerted a powerful influence in drawing students to this branch of study, and in awakening their enthusiasm in its pursuit.

D.C.L., Ph.D., F.R.S., President of the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland and Professor of Chemistry in the Royal School of Mines, London, was born at Churchtown, near Lancaster, February 18, 1825. He was educated at the Lancaster Grammar School, and studied chemistry at the Museum of Practical Geology in London, under Lyon Playfair; and he was also a student at the Universities of Marburg and Giessen, where he worked in the laboratories of Bunsen and Liebig. At Marburg in 1849 he received the degree of Ph.D. when he presented a dissertation upon his discovery of a method for isolating the radical of alcohol and ether. In 1851 he was appointed Professor of Chemistry in Owens College, Manchester, and he also became Professor in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, in 1857. In 1863 he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and in 1865 he succeeded Dr. Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry (School of Mines), then in Oxford Street, but since removed to South Kensington. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1853, and in 1870 he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. of Oxford.

In 1868 Dr. Frankland was appointed, in conjunction with Sir W. Denison, K.C.B., and J. Chalmers Norton, Esq., one of her Majesty's commissioners for inquiring into the pollution of rivers. The results of these inquiries were embodied in six reports presented to Parliament, five of them dealing with the pollution of rivers by the drainage of towns and manufactures, and the sixth with the domestic water-supply of Great Britain.

In 1871 he was elected President of the Chemical Society, and he became the first President of the Institute of Chemistry in 1877. All the chemical articles in the Arts and Sciences division of the English Cyclopædia were written by Dr. Frankland, or under his immediate supervision. The "Philosophical Transactions" for 1852 contain a long