THE SCHEELE MONUMENT AT STOCKHOLM. 685 

 THE SCHEELE MONUMENT AT STOCKHOLM. 



By FRED. HOFFMANN. 



ON the first day of August, 1874, the chemists of Great Britain 

 dedicated a monument to the British discoverer of oxygen. 

 On the same day a large number of American chemists assembled 

 at the beautifully located village of Northumberland at the junc- 

 tion of the two branches of the Susquehanna River, in order also 

 to pay homage to the memory of that remarkable theologian, 

 philosopher, and naturalist, Joseph Priestley, who lived and died 

 in that quiet Pennsylvanian village. In the orations delivered at 

 this occasion of the centennial of the discovery of oxygen, the ele- 

 ment which for the following half century became the corner- 

 stone for the structure of a new chemical philosophy, equal jus- 

 tice was done, especially by the late Prof. Sterry Hunt and Prof. 

 Lawrence Smith, to both discoverers of oxygen, Priestley and 

 Scheele. Both men, though of different caliber and station in life 

 and searching in different directions, recognized almost at the 

 same time and independently of each other the nature of oxygen, 

 and to a large extent also the important part which this element 

 plays in the commonest chemical processes and changes of matter. 

 Yet both, skilled and ingenious experimentalists though they 

 were, and Scheele keen and discerning in deduction and applica- 

 tion, prepossessed by the doctrine of Stahl, then prevalent and 

 apparently settled, missed the real bearing and ultimate conse- 

 quence of their discovery, and died defenders of the theory of 

 phlogiston — the very men who furnished the facts and the 

 weapons with which that hypothesis was shattered a few years 

 afterward by Lavoisier, and a new system of chemical philosphy 

 was established. 



The memory of these three contemporary representative in- 

 vestigators of the three foremost nations of their time — England, 

 Germany (Scheele was a German by nationality, born in Pome- 

 rania, then under Swedish rule), and France — has ever since 

 been honored. Monuments have been erected to Lavoisier in 

 Paris, to Priestley in Birmingham (1874), and to Scheele in Koping 

 (1827). Scheele especially has repeatedly been remembered by 

 his grateful adoptive country, Sweden. In 1790, four years after 

 his death, the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, of which he 

 had been a member, had a medal struck to his memory. It con- 

 tained on one side his portrait in relief, and on the other a sym- 

 bolic representation of the discovery of oxygen, and the inscrip- 

 tion, " Ingenio stat sine morte decus " (the beauty of his genius 

 stands immortal). In 1827 the Academy had a second medal 

 struck, with Scheele's portrait, and on the other side the veiled 



