Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol II (1901).djvu/249

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Fox
237
Frankland

great discontent and alarm, and after doing which Fox was knighted. The rest of his public life was devoted to an earnest advocacy of temperance. The prohibition movement, now so strong in New Zealand, owes much to his long and zealous help.

Fox's active career was chiefly marked by the part he took in gaining self-government for New Zealand; by his efforts, finally successful (thanks to the skill of Sir Donald McLean, native minister in his fourth cabinet), to arrange a lasting peace with the native tribes; by the support he always gave to provincial institutions, and by his vigorous defence of the New Zealand colonists against the charges made against them in England of forcing on wars with the Maori in order to grab their lands. His chief book, 'The War in New Zealand' (London, 1860, 8vo; another ed. 1866), is not only a warm vindication of his fellow-colonists from these accusations, but a trenchant, and in places caustic, criticism of the conduct of the native war by the English military leaders. It remains one of the best written and most interesting books on any period of New Zealand history. Another volume, 'The Six Colonies of New Zealand' (London, 1851, 8vo), has some value as a brief sketch of the colony in 1851. His other publications were: 'A Treatise on Simple Contracts' (London, 1842, 8vo), written before his emigration; a pamphlet, 'How New Zealand got its Constitution' (Auckland, 1890, 8vo); and a 'Report on the Settlement of Nelson in New Zealand' (London, 1849, 16mo).

Fox died at his residence near Auckland, New Zealand, on 23 June 1893, aged 81 (Times, 24 June 1893). Fox's generous nature and quick impulsive temperament made him an impatient critic alike of Sir George Grey's devious tactics, and of the slow-moving policy of the colonial office. The same qualities caused him to show to better advantage as the fighting leader of an opposition than when on the defensive as minister. But as his colony's strenuous champion and as the far-sighted advocate of peace and temperance, he is remembered with reverence in New Zealand.

[Gardiner's Reg. Wadham College; Fox's The Six Colonies of NewZealand, London, 1851; The War in New Zealand, London, 1866; Gisborne's New Zealand Rulers and Statesmen, London, 1897; Rusden's History of New Zealand Melbourne, 1896; Mennell's Dictionary of Australasian Biography, London, 1892; Cox's Men of Mark in New Zealand, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1886.]

W. P. R.

FRANKLAND, Sir EDWARD (1825–1899), chemist, was born at Churchtown, near Lancaster, on 18 Jan. 1825. He went Tom seven to twelve to a school in Lancaster iept by James Willasey (to whom he said later that 'he owed the development and training of the faculty of observation'), and then to the Royal Grammar School, under the Rev. James Beetham. He was apprenticed about 1840 to Stephen Ross, a chemist in Dheapside, Lancaster, with whom he worked fourteen hours a day. During his apprenticeship he learnt chemistry from Christopher Johnson and his son, Dr. James Johnson, who evicted a tenant from a cottage to turn it into a laboratory for Frankland and other lads. In 1845 Frankland went to the Museum of Practical Geology, London, to study under Dr. Lyon (later Baron) Playfair [q. v.] Here he made acquaintance with Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe, then Playfair's assistant, who, like Frankland, rose later to the front rank of chemists. The two men published an interesting paper on the conversion of ethyl cyanide into propionic acid (Mem. Chem. Soc. 1847, iii. 386), a reaction which Dumas and others showed a few months later to be typical of a series of reactions which rendered possible the synthesis of all the fatty acids (Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, xxv. 383, 656). Dumas's results were confirmed by Frankland and Kolbe later.

In 1847 Frankland was elected F.C.S., and in the same year became teacher of chemistry at Queenwood College, Hampshire [see Edmondson, George], where John Tyndall [q. v.] was teaching mathematics. The two men rose at 4 A.M. to exchange lessons before school work began. Frankland during the same period started in the school laboratory his classical research on the isolation of the 'alcohol-radicles,' whose existence had been postulated by Robert (afterwards Sir) Kane [q. v.], Berzelius, and Liebig in 1833 and 1834. In 1847 Frankland went with Kolbe for three months to work under the great chemist, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, at Marburg; and in the autumn of 1848 Frankland and Tyndall threw up their appointments to enter that university. Besides carrying out subsidiary work with Kolbe, Frankland continued here the study of the action of zinc on the alkyl iodides, which proved in his hands one of the most fruitful in the whole range of organic chemistry, and the investigations directly derived from it were carried on by Frankland down to the year 1865. It led to the synthesis of the 'organo-metallic' compounds, to that of 'organo-boron' compounds, of acids of the