1830.] The Progress of Physical Discovery. 21 



and basicity, the tendency of which to unite, occasions, according to the 

 Hungarian chemist, all chemical combinations. These principles, how- 

 ever, involve the existence of a third, that of the adhesion of bodies either 

 to basicity or acidity, which, being of an immaterial nature, belongs to 

 metaphysics rather than physics; and Winter? s system, as the Baron 

 G. Cuvier has observed, does not consequently yet rest upon demon- 

 stration ; besides which, several of the experiments on which he relies 

 have been falsified by Berthollet. 



The new nomenclature brought into use by Lavoisier and his dis- 

 ciples, has naturally tended in a high degree to facilitate and simplify 

 the study of chemical science, and to divest it of that air of mystery, and 

 that character of magic, which it had assumed in the hands of the quacks 

 of the middle ages. Nothing was more necessary than a vocabulary, 

 which should give to the primitive elements of substances simple names, 

 and should derive from these, by combination, words proper to express 

 the kind and proportion of the constituent elements of compound bodies. 

 This change of names, together with the change of system, effected by 

 the introduction of a mathematical spirit into physics, as exhibited in the 

 works of Bergman, Priestly, and Cavendish, must be classed among the 

 principal causes that have furthered the progress of natural philosophy. 

 Lavoisier's " Traite Elementaire de Chimie," of 1789, has been deservedly 

 accounted a masterpiece, in respect of both the importance of the new 

 chemical doctrines it developes, and the precision and clearness of the 

 reasoning by which it explains and demonstrates them. 



The great physical principles thus ascertained during the first half of 

 the last forty years, were accompanied by very numerous discoveries in 

 the elements of chemistry properly so called. It will suffice to mention 

 here that, in 1809, the number of metals known was twenty-seven ; ten 

 of those were ascertained in the space of twenty years, which was the 

 same number as had been discovered during the whole middle ages, 

 the ancients knowing only seven, the identity of whose number with 

 that of the planets, of the notes of the gamut, and the colours of the 

 rainbow, had given rise to a host of absurd superstitions. Of earths, 

 the ancients knew no distinction, calling them all by the vague name of 

 Caput Mortuum. Stahl, medical professor at Halle, who died in 1734, 

 first divided them into calcareous, siliceous, and argilaceous; and the 

 discovery of magnesia by Black, and barytes by Schule and Gahn, made 

 the number amount to five in 1789, which in 1809 was increased to 

 nine. The alchemists of the middle ages had found out but three acids 

 -the sulphuric, nitric, and muriatic, whilst in 1809, we were in pos- 

 session of at least thirty, besides what are formed by some of those 

 combining with different proportions of oxygen. 



This period was also characterised by the discoveries of a variety of 

 unknown substances in organic matter, amongst which the recognition 

 of the three distinct gelatinous, fibrous, and albanicuous principles in 

 animal bodies, by Fourcroy ; of albumen in vegetables, also by Four- 

 crop ; of gluten in the farina of wheat, by Bechari ; of the saccharine 

 matter, called picromel, in bile ; that of osmazome in the taste of boiled 

 meat, by Thenard; and of the astringent matter, called tannin, in plants, 

 by Seguin, are a few out of a multitude. The doctrines of the trans- 

 formation of substances, of the mixed properties of organized bodies, 

 and of transudation, received their share of investigation by Four- 



