io8 LIFE AND EXPERIENCES CHAP. 



ing and important episode in the history of chemical 

 theory. I am glad that his name is associated with 

 one of the laboratories at Owens, where he did his 

 work. That originality does receive its meed in 

 England is shown by the fact that Schorlemmer, a 

 quiet retiring man, personally known to few, was 

 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on his first 

 application a rare event. 



During the whole thirty years of my work in 

 Manchester, I am thankful to say that there were very 

 few serious accidents either to pupils or to myself. 

 On one occasion, however, I had been working on 

 perchloric acid, and I had prepared some perchloric 

 ether, which I was anxious to analyse, as this had 

 never been done. It was well known to be an 

 excessively explosive substance, and as I was filtering 

 a few cubic centimetres of the liquid into a test-tube, 

 the whole thing exploded, the bottom of the test-tube 

 bored a hole, an inch in diameter, almost through the 

 hard wood of the filter-stand, whilst the glass was 

 shivered into many thousand fragments in my left 

 hand, from which I afterwards picked out some 200 

 pieces. If I had had my hand under the test-tube it 

 would have bored a hole in it just as it did in the 

 filter-stand. This accident happened to me the day 

 before I had to give a lecture at the Royal Institution 

 in London, and I appeared at the lecture table there 

 with my hand wrapped up and my arm in a sling. 



Our numbers in the laboratory soon increased, 

 until at last we had to divide the benches and cram 

 the students into all sorts of holes and corners, and my 

 lecture class rose from fifteen or twenty to something 

 like 200. 



Knowing from my German experience what a course 

 of experimental physics should be, and as there was 



