THE LIFE OP KARL WILHELM SCHEELE xvii 



reflect that, whilst struggling to make this losing business a 

 paying concern, how hard Scheele must have laboured and 

 struggled, for here, in face of debt and all sorts and manners 

 of obstacles in front of him, he was able, in 1777, to publish 

 his remarkable treatise on Air and Fire, one of the most 

 famous works which has ever graced the annals of chemical 

 literature, and that whether we regard it from the point of 

 view of original research, its deductive reasoning, or the vast 

 amount of experimental work which served as evidence upon 

 which that reasoning was based. Bergmann at this time 

 showed his friendship for Scheele in two very practical ways. 

 In the first place, he wrote an introduction to the treatise in 

 question, pointing out the advantages of experimental science ; 

 and, in the second place, he was instrumental in obtaining 

 a grant in favour of Scheele from the Royal Swedish Academy. 

 Now mark what Scheele does with this grant. He kept 

 only a paltry one-sixth for his own private use, and the re- 

 maining five-sixths he used up in paying for the cost of fresh 

 experiments. 



From this time forward, until the day of his death, there 

 remains but little to be chronicled. He seems to have lived 

 a very quiet life, attending to his business as an apothecary on 

 the one hand, and to his experiments and corresponding with 

 his brother scientists on the other. The papers and letters 

 which he published are indeed the only historical evidence 

 of his life at this period, until his death nine years afterwards. 

 From his pen there came, annually, not one but two or three 

 papers or essays, each giving full experimental details and 

 numerical data of some new discovery of vital importance, 

 of some new chemical reaction, of some new element or com- 

 pound, or throwing a lurid light on some dark and misunder- 

 stood problems or chemical phenomena. It was here, during 

 the last nine and the best years of his life, that he attained the 



