XX11 



subjects discussed and to the form of treatment adopted. There are 

 several elaborate treatises and a great many minor pamphlets. His 

 academical notices, his official documents, his municipal reports, his 

 ft-stal speeches, his opening discourses, his commemoration addresses, 

 his funeral orations, are countless. We may be allowed briefly to 

 allude to his more important writings. 



Among these, his " Traite de Chimie appliqnee aux Arts " deserves 

 to be noticed first. This important work, which is dedicated to Baron 

 Thenard, consists of eight volumes, the first of which, as has been 

 already stated, appeared as far back as 1828 ; the last one wa pub- 

 lished twenty years later. It is accompanied by a fine Atlas of Plates. 

 The treatise has been translated into several languages, the German 

 edition being by Gottlieb Alexander and Friedrich Engelhart. In 

 the preface the author informs us that the book is founded upon the 

 notes collected for a course of chemical technology extending over 

 three years, which he had to deliver at the Royal Athenaeum. And 

 nothing could give a better idea of the time and energy devoted to 

 the preparation of these lectures. The labour of accumulating such 

 a mass of facts must certainly have been enormous, nor could the 

 effort made in disposing them in such luminous order have been 

 less. 



At a later period, about ten years after the first volume of the 

 " Traite de Chimie appliquee anx Arts " had appeared, Dumas' cele- 

 brated " Le9ons snr la Philosophic Chimique " were published. In 

 these eleven lectures, which, during the summer of 1836, were 

 delivered in the College of France, he traces the development of 

 chemical doctrines from remotest antiquity up to the time at which 

 the course was given. Indeed, the last lecture is devoted to the 

 generation of electricity by chemical action, to the chemical effects of 

 the battery, to the ever-memorable experiments of Sir Humphry 

 Davy, and to thee lectro-chemical theory he founded thereon, as well 

 as to the electro-chemical theories of Ampere and Berzelius ; while it 

 concludes with a survey of Faraday's electrolytical researches. 



Among the numerous writings of Dumas none, perhaps, has found 

 a more cordial reception in wide-spread circles than the lecture with 

 which on August 23, 1841, he concluded his course of chemistry in 

 the Medical School of Paris. This lecture is published under the 

 title " Essai de Statique Chimiqne des Etres Organises," par MM. 

 Dumas et Boussingault, and gives in a simple form the principal 

 features of the life of plants and animals considered, from a chemical 

 point of view, presenting a most eloquent resume of the chemical and 

 physiological researches in which the two friends, either individually 

 or jointly, had been engaged for many years. 



The publication of this lecture gave rise to a dispute between 

 L) in n as and Liebig regarding the priority of the ideas propounded 



