Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/74

70

a metal, so valuable for chemistry and the arts, and yet no contemporary writer has recorded the claim of our modest compatriot to the glory of this discovery. I apply to him the term modest, for in spite of all our entreaties he could never be persuaded to put forward his just claims. But to-day, as we have before our eyes the letters-patent of the Spanish government, bearing the date of 1783 and testifying to the discovery made by Chabaneau, we come to lay claim for him to the honor of incontestibleincontestable [sic] priority, and to preserve his memory, ungratefully forgotten by his contemporaries.

About 1790 Chabaneau published a large work on the natural sciences in the Spanish language, which was to have been followed by several others, but which was complete as far as regards his specialty. This work, which demanded bo much research, night work, and fatigue of every kind, gravely affected his health, and the court physicians prescribed a return to his native air and a period of complete repose. This rest and our climate affected him so favorably that in a few months his health was wholly regained, and he determined to renounce his pension of 15,000 francs in order to dwell in his fatherland and to end in this quiet retreat, in the bosom of his family, a life, hitherto passed among strangers in the midst of the most assiduous labors.

Retiring to the country, near Nontron, he sought to live obscurely, but the jury of the central schools of France besought him to accept the chair of physics and experimental chemistry in the École Centrale of Périgueux. The subjects were so seldom taught at this period that Chabaneau felt it the duty of a good citizen to accept the modest position. His course of lectures, which lasted two years, was printed at the expense of the administration, and published in the year VII by Canler at Périgueux.

On the suppression of the central schools he was offered a chair of chemistry at Paris, and his permission was sought to translate and publish his great work; but, well determined this time to live in his quiet retreat, he refused all these propositions, desiring only to live in solitude and to enjoy the repose so needed and so welcome after all his labors.

He died in January, 1842, at the age of 88, and left no descendant bearing his name. He lived tranquilly, isolated from the world, on his country-place of Clara, near Nontron, dividing his time, like a sage of antiquity, between rural pursuits and philosophical study.

We knew him only in his declining years, but he was then a fine-looking old man, with pleasing and regular features, bearing much resemblance to those of our good and lamented Béranger. His conversation was charming and always instructive. Friend and contemporary of Volney, of Cabanis, of Lavoisier, he was nourished upon their ideas and imbued with their spirit, and they were pleasingly reflected in his conversation.

Thus ends the story which has happily rescued for us from oblivion the life and work of one of the gifted early workers in chemistry. That his name had been forgotten is doubtless chiefly due to his own modesty, but in part also to the fact that his labors were largely carried on in Spain, and his only important published work was in that language. Whatever may be the reason, the atmosphere of Spain has never been conducive to the development of science.