242 THE AMERICAN CHEMIST. 



wlion ill Sweden there Avas the great Berzelius, who, from 1807 on, 

 devoted his entire energy to one great aim, the development of the 

 atomic theory, and the first vohime of whose Lchrhncli appeared in 1808; 

 in France, Gay Lussac who, in 1808, announced the law of combination 

 of gases by volume; Thenard, beginning in 1807 his investigations on 

 the compound ethers; and Pnmst (really in Madrid, whither he went 

 from France), who, in the last year of the preceding decade, began his 

 fight witli Berthollet, coutendiiig for eight years for the constancy of 

 proportion in the composition of chemical compouiuls. 



Surely something of the si)irit of this great work going on in Europe 

 should begin to make itself felt across the Atlantic, even though the 

 communication between the New World and the Old was still so difficult 

 and narroM'ly limited. lUit tliere is practically nothing recorded in the 

 only journals to a\ hich I have access, those already named, and there 

 is good ground for believing that nothing important was done. Priest- 

 ley was still contending ibr jihlogiston with Dr. Morehouse and Dr. 

 Mitchell, and performing sonie experiments of small account compared 

 with what was being done abroad; such as '"Observations on the dis- 

 covery of niter in common salt which had been previously mixed with 

 snow," and ''Transmission of acids, etc., in the form of vapor over sev- 

 eral substances in hot tubes;" " Production of air by the freezing of 

 water," Pobert Hare, jr., first appears in an "Account of fusion of 

 strontites and volatilization of platinum," andB. Silliman in an "Anal- 

 ysis of a meteoric stone." Also, there is mention of perhaps the first 

 soil analysis in America, under the title " On the substances which 

 constitute the mineral soil of the environs of Boston." 



All records fail me of any work done in the next decade, nothing 

 being given in the above Transactions, till the appearance of Sillirnan's 

 Journal in 1819; the eight short papers of that year, one of them by 

 Dr. Hare and the others by Silliman, only one to four pages each, and 

 relating to unimportant topics, merit no further mention. 



In the twenties over seventy papers of chemical import were given in 

 Silliman's Journal, of which sixteen, mostly by Robert Hare, and very 

 short Avith but four or five exceptions, referred to new forms of chemical 

 apparatus or to reagents; seventeen, from one to seven images in length, 

 related to analyses of minerals; there were two papers on the present 

 state of chenucal science and three on atomic weights, or points in 

 chemical theory; other topics were generally of no special interest. In 

 the Transactions of the American Philoso])hical Society, and in the 

 Journal of the Franklin Institute which was started during this period, 

 and the Proceedings of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York, 

 were nine short papers, chiefly on analyses of minerals. 



In the. thirties about one hundred papers appeared in Sillimairs Jour- 

 nal and the Journal of the Franklin Institute, nearly all of which were 

 short — less than five pages long; but the character of the work, so far 

 as indicated by the topics, was becoming higher; twenty-six papers 



