bishop. While thus engaged, the kindly, cheerful doctor felt no more wrath or uncharitableness toward his opponents than a smith does toward his iron. But if the iron could only speak!—and the priests and bishops took the point of view of the iron.
No doubt what Priestley's friends repeatedly urged upon him—that he would have escaped the heavier trials of his life and done more for the advancement of knowledge, if he had confined himself to his scientific pursuits and let his fellow-men go their way—was true. But it seems to have been Priestley's feeling that he was a man and a citizen before he was a philosopher, and that the duties of the two former positions are at least as imperative as those of the latter. Moreover, there are men (and I think Priestley was one of them) to whom the satisfaction of throwing down a triumphant fallacy is as great as that which attends the discovery of a new truth; who feel better satisfied with the government of the world, when they have been helping Providence by knocking an imposture on the head; and who care even more for freedom of thought than for mere advance of knowledge. These men are the Carnots who organize victory for truth, and they are, at least, as important as the generals who visibly fight their battles in the field.
Priestley's reputation as a man of science rests upon his numerous and important contributions to the chemistry of gaseous bodies; and to form a just estimate of the value of his work of the extent to which it advanced the knowledge of fact and the development of Sound theoretical views—we must reflect what chemistry was in the first half of the eighteenth century.
The vast science which now passes under that name had no existence. Air, water, and fire, were still counted among the elemental bodies; and though Van Helmont, a century before, had distinguished different kinds of air as gas ventosum and gas sylvestre, and Boyle and Hales had experimentally defined the physical properties of air, and discriminated some of the various kinds of aëriform bodies, no one suspected the existence of the numerous totally distinct gaseous elements which are now known, or dreamed that the air we breathe and the water we drink are compounds of gaseous elements.
But, in 1754, a young Scotch physician, Dr. Black, made the first clearing in this tangled backwood of knowledge. And it gives one a wonderful impression of the juvenility of scientific chemistry to think that Lord Brougham, whom so many of us recollect, attended Black's lectures when he was a student in Edinburgh. Black's researches gave the world the novel and startling conception of a gas that was a permanently elastic fluid like air, but that differed from common air in being much heavier, very poisonous, and in having the properties of an acid, capable of neutralizing the strongest alkalies; and it took the world some time to become accustomed to the notion.
