Hillebrand

John Smith; he edited A Memorial of Daniel
Webster from the City of Boston (1853); he
wrote a campaign biography, George B. McClel-
lan (1864), and was the author of a number of
other memoirs, including the Memoir and Cor-
respondence of Jeremiah Mason (privately
printed, 1873; Kansas City, Mo., 1917), and
various contributions to the Proceedings of the
Massachusetts Historical Society. He wrote
twenty-three articles for the North American
Review. His edition in five volumes of the Poet-
ical Works of Edmund Spenser (1839) was an
advance on previous editions. His most sub-
stantial work, and the fullest revelation of his
character, is his Six Months in'Italy (1853; 2ist
ed., 1881), the product of his travels in 1847-48.
To Nathaniel Hawthorne he was a tactful, help-
ful friend in a period of difficulty. In 1873 he
suffered a stroke of paralysis from which he
never recovered fully. He died at his home in
Longwood, near Boston, after a second stroke.

[Memoir by F. W. Palfrey and reminiscences by
other members in Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., vols. XVII
(1880) and XIX (1882) ; Library of Harvard Univ.,
Bibliographical Contributions, no. 46 (1895), 18-19,
26-27; Cat. of the Private Library of the late Hon. G.
S. Hillard .. . To be Sold at Auction (1879) J Boston
Transcript, Jan. 21 (obituary and editorial), 22, 23,
1879; E. L- Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles
Stunner, vols. III, IV (1893) ; Julian Hawthorne, Na-
thaniel Hawthorne and his Wife (1884), vol. I; Sam-
uel Longfellow, Life' of H. W. Longfellow (2 vols.,
1886); W. D. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaint-
ance (1900).] G.H.G.

HILLEBRAND, WILLIAM FRANCIS
(Dec. 12, i853-Feb. 7, 1925), chemist, the son
of William and Anna (Post) Hillebrand, was
born in Honolulu. His father, a native of Ger-
many, was a physician, a botanist, and a member
of the Privy Council of King Kamehameha V;
his mother was an American. The son's first
schooling was at Oahu College, Punahou, and
at the College School, Oakland, Cal. He entered
Cornell University in 1870, where he stayed until
1872. That summer, while at Bonn, Germany,
he decided upon his profession, but only because
his father suggested chemistry. He matriculated
at Heidelberg, where he studied under Bunsen,
Kirchhoff, Blum, the younger Leonhard, Karl
Klein, and Treitschke, and received the degree
of doctor of philosophy, summa cum laude, in
March 1875. Just before his death the Univer-
sity awarded him the honorary degree of doctor
of natural philosophy, because of his many dis-
coveries in the field of chemical geology.

Hillebrand's first research, in collaboration
with Thomas Herbert Norton, was on the prep-
aration, for the first time, of the metals cerium,
lanthanum and "didymium" (J. C. Poggendorff,
Annalen der Physik und Chemie, vol. CLVI,

Hillebrand
1875). Working alone he showed that these are
trivalent rare-earth metals, and not divalent alka-
line earths (Ibid., CLVIII, 1876; Philosophical
Magazine, February 1877). During three se-
mesters at Strassburg, he studied organic chem-
istry with Fittig and microscopical petrography
under Rosenbusch. In the winter of 1877-78 he
took courses in metallurgy and assaying at the
Royal Mining Academy in Freiberg. In the fall
of 1878 he returned to the United States. The
next summer he went to Colorado, where he
worked as assayer at Leadville until 1880, when
he became chemist of the Rocky Mountain Divi-
sion of the United States Geological Survey at
Denver. In November 1885 he was transferred
to the Washington laboratory.
Within less than a decade after joining the
Geological Survey, Hillebrand began to be
known for his accurate and complete analyses of
minerals and rocks. Laying especial stress upon
the determination of the elements which occur
in very small percentages, because of their sig-
nificance to the geologist, he discovered that the
igneous rocks of the Rocky Mountain region con-
tain larger percentages of barium and strontium
than are found in similar rocks farther east and
west To make such analyses required new meth-
ods, or the adaptation and improvement of
existing ones. He was active in such work, and
was the first to publish a consistent outline for
the complete analysis of a silicate rock. Appear-
ing first as a fifty-page section of Bulletin 148
(1897) of the United States Geological Survey,
this outline was four times revised, enlarged, and
separately published by the Survey (Bulletin
176, 1900; 305, 1907; 422, 1910, partly revised
when reprinted in 1916; and 700, 1919). The
first and third revisions were translated into
German.
In 1890 Hillebrand announced the discovery
of nitrogen in the gas evolved when uraninite is
dissolved in acids (American Journal of Science,
November 1890; United States Geological Sur-
vey Bulletin 78, 1890). Some peculiarities of
the gas led him to suspect that there was some
other element in it. He pointed out that the
summations of his analyses would be correct if
the gas were half as dense as nitrogen. Before
he was able to follow the matter up, Sir William
Ramsay discovered (1895) that hydrogen, ar-
gon, and helium (the last-named gas up to that
time had been known only by lines in the sun's
spectrum), are evolved from cleveite; and soon
afterwards, working with uraninite supplied by
Hillebrand, Ramsay found that the gas evolved
from it is a mixture of nitrogen and helium.
Hillebrand was appointed chief chemist of the