384? Addresses delivered at the Commemoration 



and continuance of this proceeding, we had the gratification to find 

 that our endeavours were completely successful, the man being in the 

 end restored to health. 



Not considering myself at liberty to trespass further on your time, 

 I have now, Gentlemen, to request that you will rise from your seats, 

 and, in reverential silence, drink " To the Memory of Dr. Joseph 

 Priestley, the Founder of Pneumatic Chemistry." 



The President next called upon the assembly to mark in a similar 

 manner its respect for the memory of those other distinguished indi- 

 viduals of our country who laboured with Dr. Priestley in the same 

 field of science, and who have since also paid the debt of nature. 

 The list, he observed, would be long, — commencing with Black, Ca- 

 vendish, and Kirwan, and ending with Wollaston and Davy. 



The meeting was then addressed as follows by Dr. Daubeny, Pro- 

 fessor of Chemistry at Oxford, whose name had been connected by 

 the President with an expression of respect for that University. 



In the name of the University of Oxford, I beg leave to return you 

 my best thanks for the honour you have done that body on the present 

 occasion. I receive the toast with the greater satisfaction, as an evi- 

 dence of the good feeling that subsists, and which I trust may ever be 

 maintained, between men engaged in the common cause of discover- 

 ing and of disseminating truth, whether they may chance to belong 

 to the older institutions of the country, or to those which have more 

 recently sprung up amongst us. I can assure you, on the part of 

 the University, that the same feeling is reciprocally felt towards 

 you ; and that although we in Oxford are considered to be more in- 

 tent on training and disciplining the minds of youth for the future 

 reception of scientific knowledge than in inculcating the facts of 

 any particular science, yet that for this very reason perhaps we are 

 the more sensible of the debt of gratitude we owe to such indivi- 

 duals as the one we are this day met to commemorate, who acted 

 as the pioneer in a new path of discovery, — -fully aware that our 

 theories and systems, however logical and ingenious they may be, 

 would, without the assistance of the facts brought together by the 

 labours of these experimentalists, turn out as baseless and as unsub- 

 stantial, as are those of the ancients on matters of physics, whose 

 writings amuse us in our closets. Neither ought an ecclesiastical 

 body like ours to be unmindful of the services rendered even to the 

 cause of religion by one in particular of Dr. Priestley's chemical dis- 

 coveries ; I mean that of the carbonic acid exhaled by animals being 

 found to constitute the food of plants, — a discovery which, more 

 perhaps than any other within the whole range of chemistry, is cal- 

 culated to evince the adaptation of one part of nature to another, 

 and which, ripened and confirmed as it has been by the subsequent 

 researches of Saussure and others, suggests to us the means by 

 which the Creator preserves to the atmosphere, unchanged, even to 

 the end of time, that identical constitution and those precise pro- 

 perties, which we know to be best adapted to the wants of the ani- 

 mal and the vegetable creation ; ordaining that every blade of grass 



