Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/107

Rh A dozen years later, one of the most sagacious and accurate investigators who has adorned this or any other country, Henry Cavendish, published a memoir in the "Philosophical Transactions," in which he deals not only with the "fixed air" (now called carbonic acid or carbonic anhydride) of Black, but with "inflammable air," or what we now term hydrogen.

By the rigorous application of weight and measure to all his processes, Cavendish implied the belief subsequently formulated by Lavoisier, that, in chemical processes, matter is neither created nor destroyed, and indicated the path along which all future explorers must travel. Nor did he himself halt until this path led him, in 1784, to the brilliant and fundamental discovery that water is composed of two gases united in fixed and constant proportions.

It is a trying ordeal for any man to be compared with Black and Cavendish, and Priestley cannot be said to stand on their level. Nevertheless, his achievements are not only great in themselves, but truly wonderful, if we consider the disadvantages under which he labored. Without the careful scientific training of Black, without the leisure and appliances secured by the wealth of Cavendish, he scaled the walls of science as so many Englishmen have done before and since his day; and, trusting to mother-wit to supply the place of training, and to ingenuity to create apparatus out of washing-tubs, he discovered more new gases than all his predecessors put together had done. He laid the foundation of gas analysis; he discovered the complementary actions of animal and vegetable life upon the constituents of the atmosphere; and, finally, he crowned his work, this day one hundred years ago, by the discovery of that "pure dephlogisticated air" to which the French chemists subsequently gave the name of oxygen. Its importance, as the constituent of the atmosphere which disappears in the processes of respiration and combustion, and is restored by green plants growing in sunshine, w r as proved somewhat later. For these brilliant discoveries the Royal Society elected Priestley a Fellow and gave him their medal, while the Academies of Paris and St. Petersburg conferred their membership upon him. Edinburgh had made him an honorary doctor of laws at an early period of his career; but, I need hardly add that a man of Priestley's opinions received no recognition from the universities of his own country.

That Priestley's contributions to the knowledge of chemical fact were of the greatest importance, and that they richly deserve all the praise that has been awarded to them, is unquestionable; but it must, at the same time, be admitted that he had no comprehension of the deeper significance of his work; and, so far from contributing any thing to the theory of the facts which he discovered, or assisting in their rational explanation, his influence to the end of his life was warmly exerted in favor of error. From first to last, he was a stiff adherent of the phlogiston doctrine which was prevalent when his