108 GENERAL VIEW AND BASIS OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. 



read at a meeting of the Royal Society by Dr. Wollaston, 

 who was Secretary, and- afterwards published in their 

 " Transactions." Soon after this publication another 

 anonymous handbill was circulated, offering a consider- 

 able price for every grain of palladium made by Mr. 

 Chenevix's process, or by any other process whatever. No 

 person appearing to claim the money thus offered, Dr. 

 Wollaston, about a year after, in a paper read to the 

 Royal Society, acknowledged himself to have been the- 

 discoverer of palladium, and related the process by which 

 he had obtained it from the solution of crude platina in 

 aqua regia. There could be no doubt, after this, that 

 palladium was a peculiar metal, and that Chenevix, in 

 his experiments, had fallen into some mistake, probably 

 by inadvertently employing a solution of palladium in- 

 stead of a solution of his amalgam of platinum, and thus 

 giving the properties of one solution to the other. It is 

 very much to be regretted that Dr. Wollaston allowed 

 Mr. Chenevix's paper to be printed without informing 

 him, in the first place, of the true history of palladium ; 

 and I think that, if he had been aware of the bad con- 

 sequences that were to follow, and that it would ulti- 

 mately occasion the loss of Mr. Chenevix to the science, 

 he would have acted in a different manner. I have more 

 than once conversed with Dr. Wollaston on the subject, 

 and he assured me that he did everything that he could 

 do, short of betraying his secret, to prevent Mr. Chenevix 

 from publishing his paper ; that he had called upon and 

 assured him that he himself had attempted his process 

 without being able to succeed, and that he was satisfied 

 that he had fallen into some mistake. As Mr. Chenevix 

 still persisted in his conviction of the accuracy of his own 

 experiments after repeated warnings, perhaps it is not very 

 surprising that Dr. Wollaston allowed him to publish his 



