ix] Doctrines of Respiration. 231 



by him, were the works of Stephen Hales. This remarkable 

 man did not belong to the medical profession, was not the 

 holder of any medical chair. He was a clergyman, an active, 

 perhaps too active and zealous parish priest. Born in 1677 

 at Bekesbourne in Kent, educated at Corpus Christi College 

 in Cambridge, of which he was some time a Fellow, he 

 became perpetual curate or minister at Teddington on the 

 Thames, where he made the acquaintance of Horace Walpole, 

 who however speaks of him ' as a poor, good, primitive creature,' 

 of Pope and others. He was also Rector of Farringdon in 

 Hampshire. He died in 1761. Clergyman as he was, he was 

 devoted to science ; he had begun to experiment while at 

 Cambridge " in the elaboratory of Trinity College " which the 

 then Master of Trinity, the great scholar Bentley, anxious to 

 make his College the seat of all kinds of learning, had estab- 

 lished ; and he continued his researches amid his parish duties 

 at Teddington. He was a sanitary pioneer, being the first to 

 introduce ventilation, an ardent advocate of temperance prin- 

 ciples, and one of the founders of a society which afterwards 

 became the present Society of Arts. The Royal Society, of 

 which he was an active Fellow, published his Statical Essays, 

 the first volume of which appeared in 1726, the second in 1732. 

 The second volume entitled Hmmastatics deals chiefly with the 

 mechanics of circulation. He was the first to determine, by 

 actual experiment on the living animal (he used the horse), the 

 pressure of blood on the blood vessels ; and the researches 

 recorded in this volume stand out conspicuous as marking 

 the chief advance made in this branch of physiology between 

 Borelli and Poisseuille. The first volume which treats chiefly 

 of the flow of sap in vegetables contains an essay with the 

 following title. 



" A specimen of an attempt to analyse the air by a great 

 " variety of chymico-statical experiments which shew in how 

 "great a proportion air is wrought into the composition of 

 "animal, vegetable, and mineral substances, and withal how 

 "readily it assumes its former elastic state when, in the dis- 

 " solution of those substances it is disengaged from them." 



He calls all gases ' air/ and recognizes air or gas as existing, 



