3G MEMOIR OF DR. DALTON, AND 



Beginning Juture or present. 



I shall, will, may, can or must be about to serve, &c. 



Middle future or present. 



I shall, will, may, can or must be serving, &c. 



Ending future or present. 



I shall, will, may, can, or must have served or have 

 been serving. 

 In grammar it is difficult to have absolutely new ideas, the 

 subject has been so belaboured, and at the same time it is 

 not easy to keep rigidly to any system proposed, so many of 

 the treatises have wanted clearness. We may see that in 

 that department Dalton was inclined to be an innovator, 

 although he has not the honor of being a discoverer, indeed 

 his mind was much too rigid to be inclined to yield to all 

 the flexions and variations of a subject so bordering on meta- 

 physics as grammar. Home Tooke is the writer which 

 he most admired on that subject, using sometimes his very 

 words, although not in all things following him. But 

 innovators are more dangerous in grammar, and are less 

 easily received, than in the physical sciences which have 

 'no ancestry. 



Some years afterwards he went into the shop of the pub- 

 lisher of his grammar, and asked for a copy ; he was told they 

 had none, but insisting on it, a parcel of them was found in 

 some dusty corner, very few having ever been sold. Still he 

 assures us that a Sheffield man had published it some years 

 later as his own, with some additions. 



In October of the same year he read a paper which occu- 

 pied three evenings of the Literary and Philosophical Society. 

 It is composed of four " Experimental essays on the consti- 

 tution of mixed gases ; on the force of steam or vapour from 

 water and other liquids in different temperatures, both in a 

 Torricellian vacuum and in air ; on evaporation ; and on the 

 expansion of gases by heat." (Mem. Vol. V., p. 535.) 



