SIR WILLIAM RAMSAY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 50, 13 October 1911, Page 2

SIR WILLIAM RAMSAY.

WHAT HE HAS DONE. Sir William Ramsay, the distinguished chemist, is the president this >oar of the British Association, which is meeting this week at Portsmouth for the first time. “Eighty years have passed since, in 1831, Sir David Brewster, Sir Roderick Murchison, and others founded the British Association, and during that period it has held annual meetings in various towns throughout the country,” says the “Daily Telegraph.” “Several of these places oi meeting occur more than once in the course of its long history. Four times has the British Association gathered at Oxford, and also at Edinburgh and Liverpool; while Birmingham, Manchester, and Newcastle have all been honoured more than once. Many of those great and decisive discoveries which we connect with scientific progress have been first promulgated to tiio world in these meetings, while among the Presidents on successive occasions occur the names or most of those who, in modern times, have adorned the annals of Science. Advances in Knowledge. “Professor Huxley had much to say when the meeting took place at Liverpool in 1870. So, too, had Professor Tyndall at Belrast, while on later occasions Lord Rayleigh, Sir Henry Roscoe, Sir Archibald Gcikjc, Sir william Crookes, and many others have been glad of an opportunity of publishing to the world at large tiie results 01 their assiduous suiuiec in private. Throughout the whole ol the discussions—often originated at the meetings of the British Association—there has been seen a steady advance in our knowledge of ‘matter,’ of its constitution, of its powers, of its relations to what wo term ‘spirit.’ of its proper definition. From matter as containing ‘the promise and potency of all terrestrial life,’ as Prolessor Tyndall defined it, down to the ‘electrons’ of' later students, the progress has been continuous, both in scientific hypothesis and scientific analysis. It is curious to find that side by side with a scientific development which in ordinary parlance would bo called strictly materialistic, there has arisen a philosophy, or perhaps we should call it a metaphysic, which is markedly spiritualistic. Following on tiie ‘Pragmatism’ of the late Mr William James and his disciples, the most remarkable philosopher of tne day is Mr Henry Bergson, who gives a new vindication of tiie socalled unscientific doctrine of the Freedom of the Will. “It is, however, in entire accordance with the programme of past years that the scientist to preside over the meeting at Portsmouth should be Sir William Ramsay, who is one of the greatest of our chemists. His earlier work was mainlyconcerned with the organic branch of that science. Later his attention was taken up with questions of physical and inorganic chemistry, and iie was especially interested in the properties of liquids and the relationship between their vapour pressures ana temperature. An Explorer of the Atmosphere. “In 1894. he was associated with Lord Rayleigh in the discovery oi that hitherto unknown element, argon and it was at that y ear’s, meeting of the British Association in Oxford that ho revealed to the world at large that the constituents of the atmosphere are by no means confined,to nitrogen and oxygen (besides variable quantities of moisture and traces of carbonic acid and hydrogen)', as had been hitherto supposed. In the following year he made another great discovery, finding in certain rare minerals the gas helium, which till that tirpe had only been known, on the evidence of the spectroscope, as existing in the sun. “At a later, period of research lie announced the existence in the atmosphere of three new gases, called neon, krypton, and xenon. So, too, his name is connected-with the problems of radio-activity and all that curious and interesting development of knowledge which has flowed from the discoveries of Becquerol and Monsieur and Madame Curie, whom we associate with the extraction of radium from pitchblende.”