586 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



them as they enter into liquids and pass out and as they are 

 absorbed or dissolved by colloid bodies such as caoutchouc ; he 

 attentively inquires if they are absorbed by metals in a similar 

 manner and finds the remotest analogies, which by their 

 boldness compel one to stop reading and to think if they be 

 really possible. . . . 



11 If we examine his work on Salts and on Solutions we have 

 a similar train of thought. . . . 



" A chemist must take great pleasure in following Graham 

 when he seeks the laws of the diffusion of liquids and traces 

 their connections, especially when they lead to such results as 

 he expressed by dialysis, a process founded on a new classifica- 

 tion of substances and promising still the most valuable truths. 

 We see in the inquiry how Graham thought on the internal 

 constitution of bodies, by examining the motion of the parts and 

 from the most unpromising and hopeless masses under the 

 chemist's hands — amorphous precipitates of alumina or of 

 albumen— brought out analogies which connected them with 

 the most interesting phenomena of organic life. Never has a 

 less brilliant-looking series of experiments been made by a 

 chemist, whilst few have been so brilliant in their results or 

 promise more to the inquirer who follows into the wide region 

 opened." 



No better summary of Graham's labours could well be given. 

 In one of his passages Prof. Thorpe compares Graham with 

 Dalton : 



"The tendencies of both men," he says, "were essentially 

 introspective. Each was capable of the most patient and con- 

 centrated thought and of steady, prolonged attention, wholly 

 abstracted from external objects and events." He adds: "I 

 have heard the late Dr. Young narrate the most extraordinary 

 instances of Graham's power of mental abstraction. Dalton 

 said of himself that ' If I have succeeded better than many who 

 surround me, 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 perseverance in the objects before them, 

 that some men rise to greater eminence than others.' 



" It seems like a contradiction in terms, when we reflect for 

 a moment upon the characteristic features and tendency of his 

 work, to say that Graham, like Dalton, was utterly devoid of 

 the quality we call imagination. Henry says of Dalton that 

 imagination had absolutely no part in his discoveries, except, 

 perhaps, as enabling him to gaze in mental vision upon tne 

 ultimate atoms of matter and as shaping forth those pictorial 

 representations of unseen things by which his earliest as well as 



