142 THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 



maceutical knowledge and skill greatly aided him. How crude and 

 scanty the chemical apparatus of Karl Wilhelm Scheele, the phar- 

 macist, was, is well illustrated by the German pharmaceutical his- 

 torian Herman Schelenz in his Geschichte der Pharmazie (History 

 of Pharmacy), who devotes three pages to his biography and states 

 that for want of apparatus Scheele was compelled to collect the gen- 

 erated gases in pig or beef bladders. Just think of it ! 



And nevertheless Scheele, the apothecary, was the discoverer of 

 such important gases as hydrofluoric and hydrofluorsilicic acid 

 (1771), oxygen (1772), chlorine (1774), hydrogen sulphide (1771) 

 and hydrocyanic acid (1783). 



Scheele is claim.ed by two countries. He is a son of Sweden be- 

 cause the German city Stralsund, his birthplace, was a Swedish pos- 

 session at that time. He is also claimed by Germany, as all of 

 Scheele's papers were written in his native tongue, in German, and 

 were translated by the Stockholm Academy of Sciences into Swe- 

 dish in order to be included in the Transactions. 



And just as two countries claim Scheele as their own, so do two 

 professions, chemistry and pharmacy, pronounce him as their son. 

 But as he made all his great discoveries in an apothecary shop, and 

 as he furthermore died as a pharmacist, therefore Karl Wilhelm 

 Scheele can be justly classed as an apothecary and pharmacy can 

 with great pride point him out as one of the beacon lights in the 

 profession, with the celebrated motto: "It is the truth alone that we 

 desire to know, and what joy chere is in discovering it!" 



Otto Raubenheimer, Ph. G. 



Brooklyn, N. Y. 



EXPERIMENTS WITH COAL DUST. 



Much interest is felt in England in the recent experiments at 

 Altofts colliery on the explosibility of coal dust. It appears to 

 have been demonstrated that air charged with fine coal dust may 

 be dangerously inflammable, comparing in destructive efi^ect with 

 explosions of fire-damp. In one experiment a small cannon was 

 fired electrically in the mine to raise the dust, and then a larger 

 cannon was fired to ignite it. The resulting explosion is described 

 as terrific. It has also been demonstrated that stone dust spread 

 upon the floor of the mine tends powerfully to arrest, or hmit, the 

 explosion of the coal dust. — Exchange. 



