5oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



JOHN D ALTON AND HIS ACHIEVEMENT: A GLIMPSE 



ACEOSS A CENTUKY 1 



Br Peofessok R. M. WENLEY 



UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 



IT is a melancholy reflection that the treasure laid up by great men 

 in our memories should be corrupted often by the moth and rust 

 of error. But, after all, this mischance roots in the nature of the case. 

 Necessarily, our views of the past are synoptic, because the daily details, 

 even of big events, escape us, much more the complex, ceaseless pulsa- 

 tions of the persons who have served their time and place rarely. Be 

 we appreciative or critical, we lie under sore temptation to forget the 

 inevitable limitations of human lot, and thus to lose perspective. 

 Accordingly, my scientific colleagues, 2 with whom you have done me 

 the honor to associate me in our effort to pay worthy homage to the 

 genius of John Dalton (1766-1844), whose "A New System of Chem- 

 ical Philosophy," although not completed in the second part of 1810, 3 

 had reached all its epochmaking significance, have requested me to 

 introduce the subject with some account of the difficulties, amazing to 

 us in our conditions, under which this strenuous pioneer labored. To 

 this end, we must try to pierce the cultural inwardness of English life 

 at the close of the eighteenth century, keeping in mind the peculiar 

 qualities that characterize English science even yet. 



I 



As usual, the bare facts of Dalton's story need interpretation, the 

 invisible atmosphere, their setting, imports much. Born 1766, in a 

 little village of Cumberland, a county still remarkable for its sparse 

 population, of a Quaker family, who eked out a precarious livelihood 

 upon the home industry of woolen-weaving, Dalton's social relations 

 isolated him from the chief cultural organs of the national life. Till 

 the tender age of twelve he received such instruction as the local 

 Friends' school afforded, and he appears to have made excellent use of 

 his opportunities: then he went to work as a teacher there, and as a 



1 Kead before the Research Club of the University of Michigan at its annual 

 memorial meeting, devoted in 1810 to a celebration of the centennial of Dalton's 

 atomic theory. 



2 Professor S. Lawrence Bigelow, of the department of chemistry, and 

 Professor Karl E. Guthe,' of the department of physics. 



8 It was never completed; the second part of the second volume did not 

 appear. 



