DIVERS, EDWARD English chemist, was born in London on Nov. 27, 1837. He was educated at the City of London school and the Royal College of Chemistry and then stud ied medicine at Queen's college, Galway, where he also acted as assistant and demonstrator. Between 1853 and 1873 he held a number of posts at the medical schools of several London hospitals where he lectured on materia medica, on medical jurisprudence, and on physics and chemistry. In 1873 he accepted the post of pro fessor of chemistry to the Imperial Government of Japan and stayed in Japan until he retired in 1899. Divers supervised the building and equipment of his own laboratories at the newly built engineering college. In 1886 the college was incorporated in the newly organized imperial university and Divers was transferred to the college of science of that university. After his retirement he lived in London, where he died on April 8, 1912.
It is remarkable that Divers was a great experimental chemist, although he had very bad eyesight and after an accident in the laboratory in Japan, became practically blind. His early work in Japan included an examination of Japanese minerals, which led to some fruitful work on tellurium and selenium. This was fol lowed by work on the compounds of nitrogen and sulphur and on the composition of Japanese bird lime, the manufacture of calomel in Japan and Japanese meteorites and springs.