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 session of their one spare bedroom, and resided with them in the utmost amity for twenty-six years. His laboratory was close at hand, on the premises of the Philosophical Society; and the neighbours could tell the hour to a minute by seeing him each morning read the thermometer outside his window.

His first visit to London was in 1792, for the purpose of attending the yearly meeting of Friends. He had then no scientific acquaintances, and described the metropolis to his brother as ‘a surprising place, and well worth one's while to see once, but the most disagreeable place on earth for one of a contemplative turn to reside in constantly.’ Under very different circumstances he returned thither in December 1803 to deliver a course of lectures at the Royal Institution, received, by his own perhaps sanguine account, with marked admiration. He was introduced to Sir H. Davy, but made no favourable impression, judging from the more critical than kindly sketch of his character penned at Rome in February 1829, and published by Dr. Henry (Memoir of Dalton, p. 216). Dr. Davy, his brother, too, conveyed his recollections of him in 1809–10 in the following unflattering terms: ‘Mr. Dalton's aspect and manner were repulsive. There was no gracefulness belonging to him. His voice was harsh and brawling; his gait stiff and awkward. his style of writing and conversation dry and almost crabbed. In person he was tall, bony, and slender. … Independence and simplicity of manner and originality were his best qualities. Though in comparatively humble circumstances, he maintained the dignity of the philosophical character’ (ib. p. 217).

He was at that time delivering three lectures a week at the Royal Institution. ‘I find myself just now,’ he wrote, ‘in the focus of the great and learned in the metropolis.’ Among his new acquaintances were Dr. Wollaston and Sir Joseph Banks. He had dined with James Watt at Birmingham in 1805; and foreign savants soon began to make their way to his dwelling in Manchester. Biot and Pelletan are named with others, the latter being unable to conceal his amazement at finding the great chemical philosopher engaged in giving a small boy a lesson in arithmetic.

Dalton was chosen secretary of the Manchester Philosophical Society in 1800, vice-president in 1808, and president in 1817, continuing in that office until his death. The Paris Academy of Sciences elected him in 1816 a corresponding member, and in 1830, in Davy's place, one of their eight foreign associates. He highly appreciated this compliment. Davy's offer of a nomination to the Royal Society had been refused by him in 1810, probably on grounds of expense; but he was elected in 1822, with no consent asked, and paid the usual fees. The first award of the annual prizes placed at the disposal of the Royal Society by George IV in 1825 was to Dalton ‘for his development of the chemical theory of Definite Proportions, usually called the Atomic Theory, and other discoveries.’ In his presidential discourse on the occasion, 30 Nov. 1826, Davy placed his services to chemistry on a par with those of Kepler to astronomy. Among his other distinctions was membership (from 1834) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the Berlin and Munich Academies of Science, and of the Natural History Society of Moscow. One of the most gratifying events of his life was a visit to Paris in the summer of 1822. He dined with Laplace at Arcueil in company with Berthollet, Biot, Arago, and Fourier; Gay-Lussac and Humboldt called upon him; Biot presented him at the Institute; he visited Ampère's laboratory; Cuvier did the honours of the museum to him. The pleasurable impression was never effaced.

A proposal made to him by Davy in 1818 to accompany Sir John Ross's polar expedition in a scientific capacity was declined, as well as the generous offer by Mr. Strutt of Derby of a home and laboratory, with a salary of 400l. a year and the free disposal of his time. Attachment to routine probably induced the refusal of the first, love of independence of the second. Yet the monotony of his toil led to a certain stagnation in his ideas. He discouraged reading both by precept and example. ‘I could carry all the books I have ever read on my back,’ he used to say. Narrowness and rigidity of mind were the result. What he had not himself discovered was to him almost non-existent. This unprogressiveness was strikingly manifest in the second volume of his ‘New System of Chemical Philosophy,’ published in 1827. It was a book evidently behind its time. The printing had been begun in 1817, and nearly completed in 1821; the author's experimental results being then added as obtained during six more years. They related to the metallic oxides, sulphurets, phosphorets, and alloys. Many of his old atomic weights were retained in his ‘reformed table;’ he showed himself scarcely disabused of his early prejudices concerning chlorine, sodium, and potassium; gave no sign of adhesion to the law of volumes; and continued to the end of his life to employ his own atomic symbols, completely superseded as they had been by those of Berzelius. To Dulong and