LAVOISIER. 295 



infants gazing on the material world, every object of 

 which is new to them, and whose whole existence is one 

 continued gratification of curiosity. Aware from former 

 discoveries that various kinds of air, each having its pe- 

 culiar properties, exist in nature, he was of course ever 

 expecting to meet with them; and, accordingly, he 

 soon found that the air of the atmosphere yields one 

 of these, which on a false theory he termed phlogisti- 

 cated, but which others have termed azote, being 

 incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. 

 These experiments of his were published in 1772. 



Before proceeding further with the history of chemi- 

 cal discovery, it is necessary I should mention a serious 

 inconvenience thrown in the way of the accurate in- 

 quirer by the very extraordinary manner in which the 

 * Memoirs of the French Academy' have always been 

 published. The ' Philosophical Transactions' appear 

 most regularly in two, sometimes, though very rarely, 

 in three parts every year, and all the papers published 

 each year have been read before the Society during the 

 course of that year; nay, all the papers which form each 

 part have been read during the half-year immediately 

 preceding the publication of that part. It is far other- 

 wise with the French Academy's ' Memoirs ;' these 

 never are published in less than three, sometimes even 

 four years after the year to which they nominally relate. 

 Thus the volume for 1772 consists of two parts, one 

 of which was published in 1775, and the other in 1776. 

 But this would occasion a small inconvenience to the 

 inquirer into dates and facts, if it only indicated that 

 the work was constantly in arrear, and that the papers 

 purporting to be those of any given year, as 1772, were 

 not published till three or four years later. That, how- 

 ever, is by no means the case. It continually happens 

 that the papers classed as those of one year were in 

 reality read a year or two later. In earlier periods the 

 dates are often not given at which papers were read, 

 but from internal evidence we find when they were 



