ADDRESS. 3JXXV 



to science : in their number we find the name of Mr. William Smith, who first 

 received at our meetings the ample recognition of the value of those original 

 and unaided researches, which must for ever entitle him to be considered as the 

 father of English geology; of Mr. William Allen, of Edinburgh, the eminent 

 mineralogist ; of Dr. Lloyd, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, the father of 

 our excellent colleague. Professor Lloyd, and the founder of that truly illus- 

 trious school of accurate science in that university, which has given to the 

 world a Robinson, a Hamilton, and a MacCullagh ; of Sir J. Robison, who 

 inherited from his father, the well-known Professor Robison, his taste for 

 science and its application to the arts ; of Dr. Henry, one of our most di- 

 stinguished theoretical and practical chemists, and only second in reputation 

 to his fellow-townsman. Dr. Dalton, whose very recent loss we have occasion 

 to deplore, and whose name, under such circumstances, it would be unbe- 

 coming in me to pass over with merely a passing notice. 



Mr. Dalton vvas one of that vigorous race of Cumberland yeomen amongst 

 whom are sometimes found the most simple and primitive habits and manners 

 combined with no inconsiderable literary or scientific attainments. From 

 teaching a school as a boy in his native village of Eaglesfield, near Cocker- 

 mouth, we find him at a subsequent period similarly engaged at Kendal, where 

 he had the society and assistance of Gough, the blind philosopher, and a man 

 of very remarkable powers, as well as of other persons of congenial tastes 

 with his own. In 179S, when in his twenty-third year, he became Professor 

 of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the New College in Mosley Street, 

 Manchestei-, a situation which he continued to hold for a period of six years, 

 and until that establishment was removed to this city, when he became pri- 

 vate teacher of the same subjects, occupying for the purposes of study and 

 instruction the lower rooms of the Literary and Philosophical Society in 

 George Street, rarely quitting the scene of his tranquil and unambitious la- 

 bours beyond an annual visit to his native mountains, with a joint view to 

 health and meteorological observations. 



He made his first appearance as an author in a volume of " Meteorological 

 Observations and Essays," which he published in 1793, a book of humble 

 pretensions and form, but which contains the germ of many of his subsequent 

 speculations and discoveries, more particularly as regards the co-existence 

 of an atmosphere of air and aqueous vapour, and their relations to each other : 

 and his first views of the atomic theory, which must for ever render his name 

 memorable as one of the great founders of chemical philosophy, were first 

 distinctly suggested to him during his examination of olefiant gas and carbu- 

 retted hydrogen gas. This theory was noticed in lectures which he delivered 

 at Manchester in 1 803 and 1 804, and much more explicitly in others delivered 

 at Edinburgh and Glasgow in the two following years ; it was however first 

 made generally known to the world in Dr. Thomson's Chemistry in 1807, and 

 was briefly but very explicitly developed in his own " System of Chemical 

 Philosophy," the first part of which appeared in the following year; and 

 though his claims to this great generalization were subject to some disputes 

 both at home and abroad, yet in a very short time both the doctrine and its 

 author were acknowledged and recognized by Wollaston, Davy, Berzelius, 

 and nearly all the great chemists in Europe. 



It is quite true that many important laws of chemical synthesis had been 

 discovered before his time : Richter, Wenzel and Proust, at various periods 

 between 1777 and 1793, had established the constant proportion in which 

 the elements of many bodies combine, and had hkewise hinted at the import- 

 ant derivative law, that if two elements combine in a certain proportion with 



