THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



281 



ciety was presented to Professor 

 Clarke, and he and Professor van't Hoff 

 received the degree of Doctor of Science 

 from Victoria University. 



John Dalton was born in 1766 of 

 Quaker parentage. He began to teach 

 school at the age of twelve, and sup- 

 ported himself tlirough life bj' teaching, 

 and later by making analyses for local 

 manufacturers, being thus one of the 

 earliest professional chemists. From 

 1793 until his death in 1844 he lived 

 quietly at Manchester, unmarried and 

 entering but little into society. He 

 was made secretary of the Literary and 



Memorial Tablet over door of house in 

 WHICH John Dalton was born. 



From a photograpti supplied to Nature by 

 Mr. A. Humphreys. The inscription on the 

 tablet reads : — " John Dalton, D.C.L., LL.D., 

 the Discoverer of the Atomic Theory, was born 

 here Sept. 6, 1766. Died at Manchester July 27, 

 1844." 



Philosophical Society in 1800, was its 

 president after 1817, and carried on his 

 chemical work in the rooms of the so- 

 ciety. He was a member of the Paris 

 Academy before he was elected to the 

 Royal Societj', but finally received all 

 the usual honors. Dalton once said: 



With regard to myself, I shall only say, see- 

 ing so many gentlemen present who are pur- 

 suing their studies, that if I have succeeded 

 better than many who surround me in the 

 different walks of life, it has been chiefly — 

 nay I may say almost solely — from unwearied 



assiduity. It is not so much from any superior 

 genius that one man possesses over another, 

 but more from attention to study and per- 

 severance in the objects before them, that 

 some men rise to greater eminence than 

 others. This it is, in my opinion, that makes 

 one man succeed better than another. 



Yet his own life supports the theory 

 of innate genius, for though he worked 

 diligently to the end, his great discov- 

 eries were made while he was a young 

 man. It is generally known that he 

 discovered color-blindness, sometimes 

 called Daltonism; he also did much 

 work in meteorology, recording over 

 200,000 observations; he is said to have 

 enunciated the law of the expansion 

 of gases before Gay-Lussac; he carried 

 on research in different departments of 

 physics and chemistry. But of course 

 his great discovery was the atomic 

 theory, the centenary of which has just 

 been celebrated. The theory, like most 

 others, was of gradual development, 

 but. as Dalton says in a letter to his 

 brother in 1803, he had 'got into a 

 track that has not been much trod 

 before,' and this track has become the 

 highway of modern chemistry. 



Justus von Liebig was born on May 

 12 of the year in which Dalton formu- 

 lated the atomic theory, and the hun- 

 dredth anniversary of his death has 

 been celebrated in Germany and here. 

 In New York there was a meeting of 

 chemists, Avhich was addressed by 

 President Remsen, of the Johns Hop- 

 kins University, whose laboratory has 

 done much to carry forward the work 

 in organic chemistry which Liebig 

 founded; by Professor Brewer, of Yale 

 University, one of Liebig's oldest 

 pupils, who has continued his work 

 on agi'icultural chemistry, and by Dr. 

 Carl Duisberg, managing director of 

 the Farbenfabriken of Elberfeld, who 

 spoke of Liebig's influence on the 

 chemical industries. 



There will be found articles on Liebig 

 in the third, ninth and twentieth vol- 

 umes of this joiu-nal, the last being 



