6 Biographical Account of [Jan. 



to matter are the effects of powers necessarily inherent in bodies, 

 and without which they cannot exist. These opinions he main- 

 tained without any reserve, and brought them forwards in his 

 writings when the subject appeared to call for them ; but it does 

 not seem that he took any particular pains to make converts to 

 these doctrines, or was more anxious to impress them upon the 

 minds of his readers, than any other of his opinions. They 

 were regarded by him as lying at the foundation of his specula- 

 tions, but in no other respect as being of any peculiar moment. 

 The great phenomena of attraction and repulsion he supposed 

 to depend upon the afflux and efflux of certain subtile fluids to 

 and from bodies, which, as it were, carried other bodies along 

 with them in their current. He seems to have regarded Galvanism 

 as the most powerful agent in nature, or rather the prime cause 

 of all the changes that are perpetually going forwards around us ; 

 he not only speaks of it as the first step in all physical and 

 chemical operations, but he extends its influence to the vital 

 properties of sensibility and muscular contraction. In his 

 arrangement of natural objects he recurs to the antiquated divi- 

 sion of them into four elements : under the denomination of fire 

 he includes, not only caloric, but the other imponderable fluids, 

 light, electricity, and magnetism. With respect to air, his 

 ideas do not seem to have been well defined ; but it may be con- 

 jectured that he regarded oxygen, or, as he termed it, pure air, 

 as the basis of all the other gases, and that they were formed by 

 the combination of this with some other substance. Water he 

 regarded as an undecomposable body, the ponderable part of 

 air ; and of course in all those processes where water is supposed 

 to be generated by the combination of oxygen and hydrogen, 

 the water was conceived to be merely an educt, not a product. 

 He remained to the last a firm opposer of the antiphlogistic 

 theory, and triumphed not a little in the latter part of his life, 

 when he observed that the fundamental doctrines of Lavoisier 

 were called in question, or controverted by subsequent experi- 

 ments. This was particularly the case with respect to the doc- 

 trine that acidity necessarily depends upon oxygen ; yet his 

 opinion, which he wished to substitute in its room, that acidity 

 essentially depends' upon fixed or condensed heat, is much more 

 hypothetical, and less intelligible. 



Delametherie perhaps excelled the most as a geologist and 

 mineralogist ; and on these topics, contrary to what we often 

 find to be the case, his opinions are the best matured, or at 

 least his speculations are more plausible. He conceived that, 

 every part of the globe had at some period of its existence been 

 in the liquid state, and that the waters had formerly covered the 

 highest mountains ; but it does appear that he adopted exclu- 

 sively either of the hypotheses which have divided geologists 

 into the two rival sects of the Volcanists and the Neptunists. 

 Mineral substances he divided into 10 classes : gases, waters, 



