404 PRIESTLEY. 



educated under Maclaiirin, at Edinburgh. But in this 

 science he made very little proficiency.* Indeed his whole 

 education was exceedingly imperfect, and excepting in 

 Hebrew and in Greek he never afterwards improved 

 it by any systematic course of study ; but in both these 

 languages he became well versed, and especially used 

 always to read the Scriptures in the original tongues. 

 Even in chemistry, which of the sciences he best knew 

 and in which he made so important a figure, he was 

 only half taught ; and he himself acknowledged, after 

 having failed to obtain a chemical lectureship, that he 

 " never could have acquitted himself properly in it, 

 never having given much attention to the common 

 routine of the science, and knowing but little of the 

 common processes." "When I began my experiments," 

 he says, " I knew very little of chemistry, and had in 

 a manner no idea of the subject before I attended a 

 course of lectures at an academy where I taught." So 

 that he was not well-informed, and had never studied 

 either the theoretical or the practical parts of it, but 

 just got possession of such portions of the subject as 

 occasionally came within the scope of the experiments 

 he was making, and the doctrines he was discussing at 

 the time. His whole writings, which are numberless, 

 and without method, or system, or closeness, or indeed 

 clearness, bear ample testimony to what we might ex- 

 pect would be the result of so very imperfect a found - 



* This is manifest from several parts of his writings, although 

 he in one passage of his correspondence speaks of having once been 

 very fond of the study ; for in the same paper he speaks of Baron 

 Maseres' work (< Scriptores Logarithmici 1 ) as if he had been the 

 author, instead of the collector. Mem. i. part ii. p. 490. 



