on the Origin of the Doctrine of Definite Proportions, Sc. 405 
before him. A man must be very stupid, or timid, who, on find- 
ing his property invaded, would not step forward to defend it ; 
and this I did when attacked by Mr. Dalton and his accomplices. 
I was perfectly aware of the importance of the system which I 
promulgated with so much labour, study and care; as the dia- 
grams, and the various demonstrations that appear throughout 
the work will fully prove. 
Twenty-three years have elapsed since I was appointed Pro- 
fessor of Chemistry to the honourable the Dublin Society by the 
act of parliament which established the professorship ; and ever 
since, what is called the Atomic Theory formed a part of my 
annual course of lectures. My learned friend Dr. Haworth, 
one of the physicians of Bartholomew’s hospital, and formerly 
one of the Radcliff travelling fellows from Oxford, with whom I 
had the pleasure of being intimately acquainted at the university, 
before I published, zealously espoused my system soon after it 
appeared. We both, I remember, were not a little amused at the 
reviewers of the day, who scarcely knew what to make of it; but. 
most of them, particularly those of the English and Analytical 
Reviews, allowed that it upset the phlogistic theory. 
Notwithstanding the confidence I felt as to the importance of 
my system, yet I would have remained silent, and left it to pos- 
terity to judge of it when I was no more, had it not been for the 
attempt made to wrest it from me while living and able to de- 
fend it. 
“ He certainly therefure has little or no claim.’’ ‘To have no 
claim because I was silent until Mr. Dalton published, that is, 
until Mr. Dalton laid hold of the fruits of my labour—is a very 
strange mode of reasoning. 
I have made so many replies to attacks similar to that of Dr. 
Murray that I consider it needless to say any thing more; I 
therefore refer my reader to vol. 48 of this Magazine, pages 363 
and 408; to vol.50, page 407; and to vol. 51, pages 81 and 
161; and also to my Atomic Theory, which may be had of 
Longman, Hurst, and Co. I must however make the following 
remarks : 
When I wrote the Comparative View in the year 1788, (for@t 
was published in March 1789,) the attention of the philosophical 
world was entirely engaged by the arguments brought forward 
pro and con the antagonist doctrines, so that nothing else was 
minded: at that time I was the only person in Great Britain 
that adopted the theory of Lavoisier ; in France very few of his 
countrymen supported him, and scarcely any on the rest of the 
continent countenanced his theory. 
I readily perceived from the arguments advanced by the dif- 
ferent writers on both sides of the question, that nothing deci- 
Ce3 sive 
