Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/570

552 while strikes and labor riots were going on in the surrounding works, his men worked on, having heard the facts of the case from him, and while the other oil-masters were almost without work-men during the agricultural harvest season, his personal influence was enough to keep his men at their work."

After the oil-distilling enterprise had failed, Mr. Williams went to Sheffield as chemist to the Atlas Iron Works. He conducted investigations on the manufacture of iron and steel, the effects of impurities in the same, etc., the accounts of which are fully reported in his book on the Manufacture of Iron and Steel. At Sheffield he wrote and published his book on the Fuel of the Sun, in which he assumed the existence of a universal atmosphere, upon the amount of which the planets can condense about their surfaces the densities of the planetary atmospheres depend. His speculations have not been adopted by astronomers; but the book is said to have received some curious criticisms, and contradictory—from the mathematicians, who said that "the mathematical part of the theory was correct, but there must be something wrong with the chemistry"; and from the chemists, who said that "the chemistry was all right, but there must be something wrong with the mathematics."

In 1870 Mr. Williams moved to London, where he engaged in lecturing at schools. In 1876 he gave what he called an object lesson in geography, when he took his pupils through Norway. An account of this journey is given in his book Through Norway with Ladies. He afterward gave up teaching at schools and devoted his time chiefly to scientific writing, contributing Science Notes to the Gentleman's Magazine, and papers and paragraphs to Science Gossip, Knowledge, Iron, and other periodicals. The more valuable series of these articles were collected and published in the Chemistry of Cooking (published in The Popular Science Monthly and by D. Appleton & Co.); Science in Short Chapters; A Simple Treatise on Heat; the History of the Manufacture of Iron and Steel; the Philosophy of Clothing, and Shorthand for Everybody. His uncle and adoptive father, Zachariah Watkins, by whom he had been helped in youth, to whom he dedicated The Fuel of the Sun, and with whom he dined every Saturday for twenty years, dying in 1889, left him an income that assured a comfortable support, and, as he wrote to Dr. Taylor, editor of Hardwicke's Science Gossip, he was able to begin his life work at the age of sixty-nine. This life work was A Vindication of Phrenology, on which he had been engaged, collecting material, writing, and revising, for fifty years. It was left fairly completed, and is to be published by a London house.