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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tion, which took place in this house on the 11th of March, 1890, is memorable to all for the brilliant and witty speech with which the master responded to the many addresses made to him. It is preserved in our reports (Berichte 23, 1892), and the repeated reading of it always affords rich enjoyment."

Kekulé assumed his last position, as professor at the University of Bonn, in the fall of 1867. He there devoted his attention for a period to the erection of a new institute building, but it was not long before numerous works began again to appear—some of them by himself alone, like the important investigation of the condensation products of aldehyde; and others in co-operation with his many students. The continuation of his Lehrbuch was taken in hand at the same time. In 1867 he gratified his fellow-chemists by the publication of the first volume of his Chemistry of the Benzol Derivatives. This was followed from 1880 to 1887 by single numbers, prepared with the help of co-workers, of the second and third volumes.

Prof. F. R. Japp, in the Kekulé memorial lecture before the Chemical Society of London, speaking of Kekulê's residence in that city, September, 1897, said that he always acknowledged the influence which Liebig and Odling and Williamson, with whom he became acquainted in London, exercised on the formation of his opinions. Kekulé's theories, Professor Japp said, were based on Gerhardt's type theory; on Williamson's theory of polyvalent radicals, which by their power of linking together other radicals render possible the existence of multiple types; and Odling's theory of mixed types, which was a deduction from Williamson's theory. Less consciously, perhaps, his opinions were influenced by E. Frankland's theory of the valency of elementary atoms, and by Kolbe's speculation on the constitution of organic compounds. Kekulé gathered together the various ideas which he found scattered throughout the writings of his predecessors, added to them, and welded the whole into the consistent system which forms our present theory of chemical structure. In 1857, in the course of a memoir on the constitution of fulminic acid, he gave a tabular arrangement of compounds formulated on the type of marsh gas, this being the earliest statement, though put forward only in an imperfect form, of the tetravalency of carbon. In the same year he published an important theoretical paper On the So-called Conjugated Compounds and the Theory of Polyatomic Radicals, which contains a complete system of multiple types and mixed types. In 1858 the celebrated paper, On the Constitution and Metamorphoses of Chemical Compounds, and on the Chemical Nature of Carbon, appeared. It embodies the fully developed doctrine of the tetravalency of carbon, together with