180 Mr. Colquhoun on the Life and Writings [Marc^i, 



uo mail ever ran a longer or a more brilliant career of fame. As 

 a votary of science, who has done more than he who first 

 explained the combination of oils with alkalies and metallic 

 oxides; who crystallized the fixed alkalies, and gave them a pure 

 causticity; wlio decomposed, nitric acid and ammonia; who 

 discovered fulminating silver; and who, the first great analyst of 

 vegetable and animal substances, detecting the peculiar charac- 

 teristics of each, has opened up a new and interesting branch of 

 study to the chemist? As a philosopher and theorist, who is 

 raore distinguished than the first great chemist who acceded to 

 the system of Lavoisier; who, for raore than twenty years, gave 

 to the scientific world the law on the important subject of the 

 nature of chlorine, who was the first to see and maintain, in spite 

 of prejudice, that oxygen is not the sole acidifying principle; 

 who, again superior to the errors of his day, demonstrated that 

 metallic oxides have an acid nature in one combination and aa 

 alkahne in another ; and who, in fine, is at this moment the 

 author of the profoundest work on chemical affinity which has 

 as yet seen the light? if again we turn our eyes from the inte- 

 rests of the past and present to those of the future ; if we divert 

 our attention from the existing activity and research of the busy 

 philosopher, to look to that careful forethought and watchful- 

 ness which already provided for the promotion of science during 

 the progress of ages, of centuries after his material part should. 

 be resolved into its original dust ; if we look for a man, who, 

 remembering the shortness of life and the frailty of individual 

 exertion, was anxious to organize those corporate scientific 

 boilies, whose duration should terminate only with the end of 

 the human race, and whose methodical advances in the career 

 of knowledge should be regular and certain; who has done more 

 for the time unknown to come than the assiduous Academician, 

 the leading member at the formation of the National Institute 

 of France, the founder of the Institute of Egypt, the afi^ectionate 

 father of the illustrious Society of Arcueil '. Should we again 

 regard the man of business and philanthropist, ever studious to 

 advance the comforts of jiumanity, what man is a greater bene- 

 factor to his species than the author of the Elements of the Art 

 of Dyeing ; the instructor of the process of extracting soda from 

 sea salt; tlie indicator of the mode of illumination by gas; the 

 friend who supplies the unwearied seaman with a wholesome 

 beverage in his lonely voyage ; the man, in fine, whose name is 

 identified with improvement itself, and ingrafted into his native 

 tongue ; — an eternal memorial of the benefits lie conferred on one 

 of the most common, the most useful, and the most universal of 

 the arts ? 



When, in addition to all this, we find in BerthoUet that zeal- 

 oi]g love of country, which made him the soul of the miraculous 



