22 THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 



yellow, add mistle-toe, hearts of peonies, elk's hoofs, and the pul- 

 verized skull of a malefactor; distill all these dry, rectify the dis- 

 tillate over castoreum and elephant's lice, then mix with salt of 

 peony, spirit of wine, liquors of pearls and corals, oil of aniseed and 

 oil of amber, and digest on a water-bath one month." 



Still at this time Chemistry stood only on Mount Abarim and 

 gazed at the Promised Land which it was not to enter until the 

 ensuing century. 



To-day we know about eighty elements; he knew about fifteen. 



In Scheele's day fire was procured by means of flint and steel with 



tinder-boxes and sulphur-tipped splints of wood. It was forty years 



after his death before the first friction matches were invented by 



the English druggist, John Walker, of Stockton-on-Tees. 



Only after his body had turned to dust, was gas used for light- 

 ing, was the hydraulic press patented, was the Voltaic pile made, 

 was electro-magnetism discovered, was the limelight of Drummond 

 invented, and the Daguerreotype process introduced. 



Scheele died in 1786, and it was not till the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth century that Dalton announced his atomic theory and for- 

 mulated the Law of Definite Proportions which became the imme- 

 diate cause of innumerable discoveries. Mendeleyeff's important 

 system in which it is shown that the properties of the elements are 

 periodic functions of their atomic weights, came much later still. 



In 1805, Serturner discovered the basic constituents of opium, 

 and thus paved the way for the alkaloids, but Scheele never heard 

 of morphine, strychnine or quinine. 



By means of the galvanic battery Humphrey Davy did wondrous 

 things — he discovered element after element, he decomposed water 

 into hydrogen and oxygen, he separated salts into acid and base, 

 he resolved acids into their electro-positive and electro-negative 

 constituents, he simplified bases into the metal and oxygen, — but 

 there was no voltaic chemistry while Scheele lived. 



Michael Faraday began systematic work in the liquefaction of 

 gases and liquefied chlorine, hydrogen sulphide, cyanogen, ammonia 

 and sulphurous acid. On December 24, 1877, at a meeting of the 

 French Academy a paper by Cailletet was read containing these 

 welcome words : 'T have just this day liquefied oxygen and carbon 

 monoxide." There was another paper by Pictet announcing: "To- 

 day I liquefied oxygen at a pressure of 320 atmospheres and a tern- 



