56 MEMOIR OF DR. DALTON, AND 



agreeably disappointed to find so learned and attentive an 

 audience, though many of them of rank. It required great 

 labour on my part to get acquainted with the apparatus and 

 to draw up the order of experiments and repeat them in the 

 intervals between the lectures, though I had one pretty expert 

 to assist me. We had the good fortune, however, never to 

 fail in any experiment, though I was once so ill prepared as 

 to beg the indulgence of the audience, as to part of the lecture, 

 which they most handsomely and immediately granted me by 

 a general plaudit. The scientific part of the audience was 

 wonderfully taken with some of my original notices relative 

 to heat, the gases, &c., some of which had not before been 

 published. Had my hearers been generally of the description 

 I had apprehended, the most interesting lectures I had to give, 

 would have been the least relished, but as it happened, the 

 expectations formed had drawn several gentlemen of first-rate 

 talents together ; and my eighteenth, on heat, and the cause 

 of expansion, &c., was received with the greatest applause, 

 with very few experiments. The one that followed was on 

 mixed elastic fluids, in which I had an opportunity of 

 developing my ideas, that have already been published on the 

 subject more fully. The doctrine has, as I apprehended it 

 would, excited the attention of philosophers throughout 

 Europe. Two journals in the German language, came 

 into the Royal Institution, whilst I was there, from Saxony, 

 both of which were about half filled with translations of the 

 papers I have written on the subject, and comments on them. 

 Dr. Ainslie was occasionally one of my audience, and his sons 

 constantly : he came up at the concluding lecture, expressed 

 his high satisfaction, and he believed it was the same senti- 

 ment with all or most of the audience. I was at the Royal 

 Society one evening, and at Sir Joseph Banks's another. This 

 gentleman I had not, however, the pleasure of seeing, he 

 being indisposed all the time I was in London. 



" I saw my successor, William Allen, fairly launched ; he 



