Page:A History of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania.djvu/163

 I saw some of them exhibited by a celebrated Professor who mentioned Mr. Hare as the reputed author of the invention.

“In December, 1811, I instituted a course of experiments with Mr. Hare’s Blowpipe, in which I melted lime and magnesia, and a long list of the most refractory minerals, gems, and others, the greater part of which had never been melted before; and I supposed that I had decomposed lime, barytes, strontites, and magnesia, evolving their metallic bases, which burn in the air as fast as produced. I communicated a detailed account of my experiments to the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, who published it in their ‘Transactions’ in 1812. With their leave it was communicated to Dr. Bruce’s ‘Mineralogical Journal,’ and was printed in the 4th number of that work. Hundreds of my pupils can testify that Mr. Hare’s splendid experiments, and many others performed by his Blowpipe, fed by oxygen and hydrogen gases, have been for years past annually exhibited in my public courses of Chymistry in Yale College, and that the fusion of the earths, of rock crystals, gun flint, of the corundum gems, and many other very refractory substances, and the production of light beyond the brightness of the sun, have been familiar experiments in my laboratory. I have uniformly given Mr. Hare the credit of his invention, although my researches with his instrument had been pushed further than his own, and a good many new results added.

“It is therefore with no small surprise that, in the ‘Annales de Chimie et de Physique’ for September, 1816, I found a translation of a very elaborate Memoir from a scientific journal published at the Royal Institution in London, in which a full account is given of a very interesting series of experiments performed by means of Mr. Hare’s instrument, or one on the same principle, but without any notice being taken of Mr. Hare’s invention, or experiments, or mine; and that the whole is exhibited as original. On a comparison of the Memoir in question with Mr. Hare’s and my own, I find that very many of the results are identical, and all the new ones are derived from Mr. Hare’s instrument with the following difference: In Mr. Hare’s the two gases were in distinct reservoirs, to prevent explosion. They were propelled by the pressure of a column