goodness of his head, admirable as it was, was exceeded by that of his heart. I have never ceased to admire him from the moment I first saw him, and my esteem for his great qualities and regret for his loss will only end with my life."

Due honours were paid after death to this great man. The Court of Directors placed a statue of him in St. Paul's Cathedral; and Lady Jones erected a monument to him in the ante-chapel of University College, Oxford. In conformity with his own expressed opinion, that "the best monument that can be erected to a man of literary talent, is a good edition of his works," she caused them to be collected and printed in 1799, in six quarto volumes. They have been reprinted in octavo. A life of Sir William Jones was afterwards written by Lord Teignmouth, his intimate friend in India, at Lady Jones's request. There is a memoir in the Annual Obituary for 1817, which is chiefly devoted to set forth the political opinions of Sir William Jones, in a stronger light than seemed fitting to his noble biographer.

ANTOINE LAURENT LAVOISIER was born in Paris, August 26, 1743. He was educated under the eye of his father, a man of opulence, with discernment to appreciate his son's abilities, and liberality to cultivate them without regard to cost. Lavoisier early showed a decided inclination for the physical sciences; and before he was twenty years old, had made himself master of the principal branches of natural philosophy.

In 1764 the government proposed an extraordinary premium for the best and cheapest project of lighting the streets of Paris, and other large cities. To this subject, involving a knowledge of several branches of cience, Lavoisier immediately devoted his attention.

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He produced so able a memoir, full of the most masterly, accurate, and practical views, that the gold medal was awarded to him. This production was the means of introducing him into the Academy of Sciences, of which, after a severe contest, he was admitted a member, May 13, 1768; and he proved himself through life one of its most useful and valuable asso

ciates.

At this time the whole range of chemical and physico-chemical science was in an extremely imperfect state; and the first steps to a more improved system involved the necessity of clearing away a vast mass of error which encumber the path to truth. For instance, one of the fanciful ideas, the offspring of the alchymy of the dark ages, which still continued to haunt the regions of science, was the belief of the conversion of water into earth by gradual consolidation. This subject Lavoisier treated in the true spirit of the experimental method, and clearly showed that the pretended conversion was either a deposition of earthy particles, or a sediment arising from the action of the water on the internal surface of the retort. He also laboured on the analysis of the gypsum found in the neighbourhood of Paris, and on the crystallisation of salts. He discussed the project of conveying water from L'Yvette to Paris, and the theory of congelation; and to these researches added extensive observations on the phenomena of thunder and the Aurora Borealis.

He next directed his attention more especially to mineralogy; and made excursions, in conjunction with Guettard, into all parts of France, endeavouring to form from different districts a complete collection of their characteristic mineral productions. He made advances towards a systematic classification of facts connected with the localities of fossils, which afterwards served as the basis of his work on the revolu

tions of the globe and the formation of successive strata, of which two admirable abstracts were inserted in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, for 1772 and 1787.

Thus during the earlier part of his life, Lavoisier does not seem to have devoted himself in particular to any one branch of science. But about the year 1770 the announcement of the existence of more than one species of gaseous matter, arising out of the successive researches of Black, Scheele, Priestley, and Cavendish, had the effect of fixing his attention to the subject of pneumatic chemistry. The invaluable discoveries just alluded to had opened a new world to the inquirer into nature; and the labours of those distinguished experimentalists had conspired to commence a fresh era in science. Lavoisier was one of the first to appreciate at once the importance of the results they had arrived at, and the immense field of further research to which those results had opened the way. He perceived by a sort of instinct the glorious career which lay before him; and the influence which this new science thus, as it were, created, must have over every sort of physical research. Priestley possessed precisely those qualifications which are most available for striking out new and brilliant discoveries of facts; a boundless fertility of invention; a power of rapidly seizing remote analogies; and an equal readiness in framing and in abandoning hypotheses, which have no value, but as guides to experiment. Lavoisier, less eminent in these respects, possessed in a more peculiar degree the mental characteristics which enable their owner to advance to grand generalisations and philosophical theories upon the sure basis of facts. He possessed, in its fullest sense, the true spirit of inductive caution, and even geometrical rigour; and his observations, eminently precise and luminous, always pointed to more general views.

In 1774 he published his 'Opuscules Chimiques,' in which, after a full and truly philosophical examination of the labours of preceding experimenters in the discovery of the gases and their characteristic properties, he proceeds to describe his own beautiful and fundamentally important researches, from which resulted the True Theory of Combustion,' which may be termed the very sun and centre of the whole modern system of chemistry.

To the vague dreams of the alchymist had succeeded the remarkable theory of Hooke, who maintained that a certain ingredient of the atmospheric air (which also enters as an ingredient into several other bodies, especially nitre) was the solvent which absorbed a portion of the combustible. This process was continued in proportion as more of the solvent was supplied. The solution took place with such rapidity, as to occasion those motions or pulsations in which Hooke believed heat and light to consist.

This near approach to the truth was thrown into discredit by the more brilliant and imposing theory of Stahl, who captivated the imaginations of chemists by his doctrine of phlogiston, the principle or element of fire, a sort of metaphysical something, which conferred the property of being combustible. taught that the process of combustion deprived bodies of their phlogiston, which, in the act of separation, exhibited its latent energies in the evolution of light and heat.

Stahl

This wild chimera long maintained its ground, and received successive modifications in the hands of several distinguished chemists, the most important of which was that of Kirwan; but these all retained the fundamental error that something was abstracted from the burning body. Yet Rey, so early as 1630, and Bayer afterwards, had both shown that metals by calcination increase in weight, or have something