Sir William Croekes, the veteran chemist and physicist, died on
Friday week at the age of-eighty-six. 'He made his reputation as long ago as 1861 by discovering the rare metal thallium, and he followed this up by studies of electric discharges in.s vacuum which led to a new conception of matter as composed ultimately of electrons or electric particles in continual movement, recalling the Old Greek view of Heraolitus. Sir William Crookce aroused moth-public interest in 1899 by his-presidential -address to the British -Association, in which he predicted that our wheas supply would become -insufficient to meet the world's demand, unless chemists could devise a means of exnacting nitrogen from the air in order to manufacture nitrogenous manures. The European races, who subsist on bread, would, ho suggested, be ousted-by thence-eating peoples if the themiste failed them. Fortunately for 'Europe; Sir William Croekes underestimated both the world's -wheat crops and the chemist's skill.
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