Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/70

66 of water into earth, in which the balance was used as an instrument of chemical research, and which soon led to the conception of the permanence of matter and later to the overthrow of the phlogiston theory. This work of Lavoisier could not fail to make a great impression upon such a mind as that of Chabaneau.

His pupils made rapid progress; they wondered at the knowledge of the young professor, and the director, abbe" La Rose, did not cease from expressing his satisfaction. . ..

Chabaneau was now about twenty years old, an age when is often born the love of independence. He knew that the knowledge which he now possessed would suffice to supply all his material needs. He therefore resigned from his position in the college of Passy, after having expressed his most sincere thanks to his benefactor, and, taking lodgings in the Rue des Mathurins, within the city, opened after the fashion of that day a course of public lectures which met with great success.

Among the most assiduous of his auditors were the young sons of the Comte de Pena-Florida, whose father had sent them to France to complete their education, and also to procure several professors for a great college for the nobility which he purposed founding at Bergara.

Bergara was a small city in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa in northern Spain, and near the bay of Biscay. It afterwards came into some prominence as the place where the treaty was signed in 1839 between Spain and the Carlists of the Basque provinces. Of the subsequent history of the college I have been able to learn nothing.

The young nobles gained the affection of their professor and made him the most brilliant offers if he would accept the direction of the college founded by their father. For a long time Chabaneau resisted, but, finally yielding to the earnest solicitation of the young marquesses and other friends, he decided to exchange France for Spain. He immediately began the study of the Spanish language, and with such ardor that in a few months he felt that he had fully mastered it.

He remained three years at Bergara, devoted himself without relaxation to scientific study, and acquired such a reputation that the king, Charles III., wishing to locate him in Madrid, created for him a public Chair of Mineralogy, Physics and Chemistry, lodged him in one of his palaces, and granted him an annual stipend of 2,200 piasters ($2,400), a very considerable sum for that time.

The inauguration of his course took place in the presence of the king and all the court. This opening lecture had for its subject the utility and the future of science, and was so remarkable that a Spanish poet composed for the occasion an ode, dedicated to the learned professor. Impelled by the love of science and wishing to justify the high favor in which he was held by the king, Chabaneau continued with great earnestness his scientific work. As he desired to enter into relations with all the learned men of Europe and to profit by their work, he recognized the necessity of studying English, Italian, German, etc. So energetic was he in his language study that at the age of twenty-five he was master of no less than eight languages, living or dead.

Charles III. provided Chabaneau with a valuable library and a laboratory, considered at that day "magnificent." All the spare moments remaining from his public instruction were devoted to the study of physics and especially of chemistry. At this period Spanish America was sending to the mint at Madrid