166 LIFE OF BENJAMIN SILLIMAN. 



with his apparatus and experiments, and with the opera- 

 tions of his great mind ; and as my conversation regarding 

 Lavoisier was only eleven and a half years after his death, 

 Dr. Hope's recollections of him were doubtless correct. 

 Lavoisier was guillotined May 8th, 1794, by the Revolution- 

 ary Tribunal, on the frivolous pretext that he had adulter- 

 ated tobacco ; and they even refused him a respite of a few 

 days, to enable him to complete some experiments then in 

 progress. The report in his case declared that the Repub- 

 lic had no need of chemists. Bloody and execrable des- 

 potism, infamous through all time ! Dr. Hope's admira- 

 ble course finished my educational training in chemistry. 

 I understood, realized, and retained every part of it. To 

 me it was worth a voyage across the Atlantic. 



Dr. John Murray called then Mr. Murray was a 

 private lecturer, not connected with the University ; but his 

 high reputation for talents and learning secured him a 

 class respectable for numbers and character. Pie had also 

 distinguished himself by an excellent elementary work on 

 chemistry, and by a system of materia medico, which was 

 of the first authority among the treatises on that subject. 

 He was a very agreeable lecturer, with a pleasant intona- 

 tion, and a voice of sufficient strength. He spoke with 

 perfect ease, in a style lucid, terse, and flowing, but without 

 diffuseness. His manner and action were graceful, and his 

 treatment of the class polite and friendly ; so that he se- 

 cured their good-will, and was able to maintain good order 

 in his lecture-room, which was an apartment in his house, 

 not capable of containing more than thirty-five or forty 

 persons. 



Dr. Murray, when I was his pupil, was threatened with 

 consumption, and died not many years after I left Edin- 

 burgh. He wrote to me a year or two after my return, and 

 informed me that he was about going to the south of Eng- 

 land to revive his health. A son who bore his name, re- 



