I congratulate you (and Mrs. Thorpe) on your completion of the paper. We are to decide, or begin to decide, about the Chemical Society Medal on Thursday, and I hope it will be settled to your satisfaction. At this gathering it was decided to attempt to establish a society to subserve the general interests of chemical industry and not merely those of the South Lancashire district, and to call a meeting in London to discuss the project. He presided at this meeting in the rooms of the Chemical Society when the Society was formally inaugurated. He served as its first President, and was the first chairman of its Manchester section. He opened the proceedings of its first annual general meeting in 1881 with an account of the reasons for the formation of such a society; he indicated its proposed scope, and dwelt upon the many advantages to science and industry that might be expected to follow its creation. What he said then is not less pertinent now. Perhaps, indeed, it is even more so. His words were words of wisdom and of warning. Read in the fierce light of current events, and of present disabilities, we may well inquire whether the generation that has passed has been as mindful as he had hoped it would be of its opportunities. If it had quickened its energies and marshalled its forces as he encouraged it to do, we should have been better able to meet the strenuous times that are now in store for us. For upwards of a century—ever since, indeed, the renascence of chemical science which originated with Lavoisier—far-sighted men have been preaching the same story. But to the great majority in this country it has been as seed fallen by the wayside. Not so abroad. Thanks mainly to a clearer recognition of the part that science plays under the changing and progressive conditions of modern life, other nations have been more heedful: the seed with them fell upon more receptive soil. The catastrophe which has overtaken us has brought a rude awakening. We are beginning to realize the imperfection of a system of national education which has no adequate relation to present-day necessities. Roscoe, one is consoled to think, lived to see the evidence of this quickening. The doctrine which he preached with an insistency and pertinacity that never flagged, during more than half a century, is now, under the stress of necessity, coming home to men’s business and bosoms as it never did before. One proof of the Society’s recognition of its indebtedness to its first President may be seen in the award to him of its medal on the occasion of the Nottingham meeting in 1914. In 1909 he was Honorary President of the Seventh International Congress of Applied Chemistry which met in London in that year. It was his wish that his friend, Dr. Ludwig Mond, as an eminent industrial chemist, should be appointed to that office, but Mond declined the position and proposed Roscoe’s name instead at the preceding meeting in Rome.