Nobel Prize Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays and Philipp Lenard's work on cathode rays. The Academy of Sciences selected Röntgen for the prize. In the last decades of the 19th century, many chemists had made significant contributions. Thus, with the Chemistry Prize, the Academy "was chiefly faced with merely deciding the order in which these scientists should be awarded the prize". The Academy received 20 nominations, eleven of them for Jacobus van 't Hoff. Van 't Hoff was awarded the prize for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics. The Swedish Academy chose the poet Sully Prudhomme for the first Nobel Prize in Literature.
James Sully of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, where he was succeeded by Carveth Read. An adherent of the associationist his school of psychology, his views had great affinity with those of Alexander Bain. He wrote monographs on subjects such as pessimism, and psychology textbooks, some of the first in English, including "The Human Mind "(1892). His 1881 "Illusions" was commended by both Freud and Wundt. Sully opened an experimental psychology laboratory at University College London in January 1898. In 1901 he was one of the founder members of the British Psychological Society and in fact personally