32 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY I 



long imprisonment. 1 In those days the guns 

 that were pointed by the Church against the 

 Dissenters were shotted. The law was a cesspool 

 of iniquity and cruelty. Adam Smith was a new 

 prophet whom few regarded, and commerce was 

 hampered by idiotic impediments, and ruined 

 by still more absurd help, on the part of 

 government. 



Birmingham, though already the centre of a 

 considerable industry, was a mere village as 

 compared with its present extent. People who 

 travelled went about armed, by reason of the 

 abundance of highwaymen and the paucity and 

 inefficiency of the police. Stage coaches had 

 not reached Birmingham, and it took three days 

 to get to London. Even canals were a recent 

 and much opposed invention. 



Newton had laid the foundation of a mechanical 

 conception of the physical universe : Hartley, 

 putting a modern face upon ancient materialism, 

 had extended that mechanical conception to psy- 

 chology; Linnaeus and Haller were beginning to 

 introduce method and order into the chaotic 

 acccumulation of biological facts. But those 

 parts of physical science which deal with heat, 

 electricity, and magnetism, and above all, 

 chemistry, in the modern sense, can hardly 

 be said to have had an existence. No one 



1 In 1732 Doddridge was cited for teaching without the 

 Bishop's leave, at Northampton. 



