substance then known, and which they therefore attributed to the then hypothetical element, helium. Sir Edward Frankland, who was made a K.C.B. in 1897, died on the 9th of August 1899 while on a holiday at Golaa, Gudbrandsdalen, Norway. A memorial lecture delivered by Professor H. E. Armstrong before the London Chemical Society on the 31st of October 1901 contained many personal details of Frankland's life, together with a full discussion of his scientific work; and a volume of _Autobiographical Sketches_ was printed for private circulation in 1902. His original papers, down to 1877, were collected and published in that year as _Experimental Researches in Pure, Applied and Physical Chemistry_. FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN (1706-1790), American diplomat, statesman and scientist, was born on the 17th of January 1706 in a house in Milk Street, opposite the Old South church, Boston, Massachusetts. He was the tenth son of Josiah Franklin, and the eighth child and youngest son of ten children borne by Abiah Folger, his father's second wife. The elder Franklin was born at Ecton in Northamptonshire, England, where the strongly Protestant Franklin family may be traced back for nearly four centuries. He had married young and had migrated from Banbury to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1685. Benjamin could not remember when he did not know how to read, and when eight years old he was sent to the Boston grammar school, being destined by his father for the church as a tithe of his sons. He spent a year there and a year in a school for writing and arithmetic, and then at the age of ten he was taken from school to assist his father in the business of a tallow-chandler and soapboiler. In his thirteenth year he was apprenticed to his half-brother James, who was establishing himself in the printing business, and who in 1721 started the _New England Courant_, one of the earliest newspapers in America.