At a distance of thirty years, Professor Dewar said, at the London memorial meeting, that to look back and call to mind the presence and personality of the great chemist as he knew him was indeed a pleasure. He was a man of noble mien, handsome, dignified, and yet of a homely and kindly disposition. He was a severe critic, having a haughty contempt for the accidental and bizarre in scientific work. His originality and suggestiveness seemed endless, so that he had no need to commit trespass or to follow just in the wake of other people's ideas. "Everything that passed through the Kekulé alembic was indeed transmuted into pure gold. His precision of thought and diction rendered his papers profoundly suggestive to other workers."
"The last years of the master's life," his German eulogist says, "were often troubled by illness, but there were not wanting bright days which the love of his students and colleagues prepared for him." Such a one was the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his professorship at Bonn, June 1, 1892, in which the students and officers participated with cordial unanimity. The ceremony began in the morning with an enthusiastic ovation by the students. The chemical theater was decorated with plants; the benzene hexagon was figured on the blackboard with garlands of flowers, in the midst of which the letters A. K. were wrought in a monogram of roses. Alfred Helle, one of the chemical students, delivered a felicitous address, in which he congratulated his fellow-students on being privileged to sit at the feet of the greatest of living chemists, after which three cheers were given to the professor. Kekulé responded to the offering in an address giving some of the details of his life, from which we have already quoted. Kekulé's personal staff and the officers of the university then presented their congratulations.
In the evening the students honored him with a torchlight procession, it being the third time he had received this, the most conspicuous honor which is bestowed by German students. The first occasion was in 1875, when he declined the professorship at Munich; the second was in 1878, when he was rector of the university, and was given in celebration of the restoration of unity among the students, after a long period of disunion. Among the torchbearers on that occasion was the present Emperor of Germany.
During the later period of his life Kekulé was comparatively sterile. Those who knew him, however, Professor Thorpe says, "would be the first to affirm that this seeming apathy sprang from no natural indifference. There is no doubt that he suffered, even in the early period of middle life, from the intense stress and strain of his mental labors prior to the Ghent period. He too surely exemplified the sad truth of Liebig's saying that he who would become a great chemist must pay for his pre-eminence by the sacrifice of his health. There is reason to know that it was the consciousness of failing power which prevented him from finishing much to which he had put his hand, and that his fastidiousness and his sense of 'finish,' amounting almost to hypercriticism, restrained him from publishing much which he realized fell short of his ideal."
The last time Kekulé's name was brought before the public was on the occasion of the renewal of the ancient title of nobility of his family, as August Kekulé von Stradowitz.
Editor's Table.
A VOICE FROM THE PULPIT.
We called attention last month to a weak attack on the doctrine of evolution by a certain Mr. A. J. Smith, Superintendent of Public Schools in the city of St. Paul. The only thing which gave any consequence to the deliverance in question was that it was addressed to a large gathering of public-school teachers, who might possibly have been unduly influenced in their appreciation of it by the speaker's official position. We are glad now to learn that, very shortly after the publication of Superintendent Smith's address, an excellent statement of the true relation of the doctrine of evolution to education was made in one of the city pulpits by the Rev. S. G. Smith, who did not boast, as the superintendent had done, of having made an exhaustive study of the subject, but who, nevertheless, showed that he had a grasp of it which the other altogether lacked. The Rev. Mr. Smith's discourse would have merited attention wherever it might have been delivered; but, considered as a pulpit utterance, it seems to us to possess a special and very encouraging significance. We need hardly say that the pulpit has not always been friendly to broad scientific views, but in this case it has spoken with a candor, a breadth, and an intelligence which the lecture platform can not do more than equal, and which it would certainly be too much to look for in all our colleges.