Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/841

Rh Dr. Adam Seybert (died 1825) was a pioneer in air analysis, having made twenty-seven analyses of the air by eudiometric methods on a voyage across the Atlantic in 1797. He came to the conclusion that the sea exerted purifying power over the air.

Benjamin Silliman, at the time of the founding of the Columbian Chemical Society, was forty years of age and had held the chair of chemistry in Yale College for ten years. The American Journal of Science was not begun until 1818. Silliman's name is a household word among us, and no eulogium is here needed to magnify his position in the scientific world.

The prominence of medical men on the roll of members is evident and readily explained. Before the days of schools of science, and before colleges devoted a portion of their curricula to scientific studies, almost the only training in science received by American youth was in the medical schools. The chairs of natural history and of the physical sciences were almost exclusively held by physicians whose education more nearly qualified them for teaching these branches of knowledge than the graduates of the classical courses customary in all colleges. To elevate the standard of membership in the Columbian Chemical Society a number of distinguished foreigners were enrolled. These included such men as Berthollet, Gay-Lussac, John Dalton, Sir Humphry Davy, and Dr. Wollaston, but no representatives of Germany or Sweden, which presumably indicates that at this early date communication and exchange of courtesies with Germany and northern Europe were less common than with France and England.

The society issued in 1813 one volume of Memoirs, containing twenty-six essays by ten writers on a great variety of topics—original, speculative, and practical. Eight of these papers are from the pen of Dr. Thomas D. Mitchell. In his Remarks on the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Systems of Chemistry he supports the Lavoisierian theory of combustion, stating that there is "no necessity for a principle of inflammability." He cites the experiment of Woodhouse, who obtained an inflammable air by heating charcoal with scales of iron, both being free from water; and points out that Cruikshank, of Woolwich, demonstrated that the inflammable gas thus obtained is gaseous oxide of carbon (carbon monoxide), discovered by Priestley in 1799 and combustible although containing no hydrogen. He compares combustion with neutralization of an acid and base, and says, "Inflammation and acidity are effects resulting from the action of relative causes and not attributable to a single agent or principle."

Dr. Mitchell, in his paper Remarks on Heat, objects to the term "latent heat" and to Dr. Black's theories. In a paper entitled On Muriatic and Oxymuriatic Acids he attacks the views of