618 The Smithsonian Institution 



try, notably those pieces which had been used by Doctor 

 Hare in his isolation of calcium without the aid of galvanism. 

 To this collection were added in 1859, by the gift of J. R. 

 Priestley (a grandson of the discoverer of oxygen), a burning 

 lens and a condensing air-pump. It was with these instru- 

 ments that Joseph Priestley discovered the gas which is now 

 called oxygen. With this discovery, made on August i, 1774, 

 begins the history of modern chemistry. 



From the greatest of the early American chemists we return 

 to the first of living American chemists for the purpose of 

 mentioning the grant, in 1859, of a small appropriation to 

 Wolcott Gibbs in order to defray the expenses of the neces- 

 sary material and apparatus for an investigation relative to 

 the ores of platinum, in which Doctor Gibbs successfully sep- 

 arated the different platinum metals and discovered a series 

 of compounds containing osmium, ruthenium, and iridium. 

 The results of this investigation were permitted by the 

 Smithsonian Institution to appear in the "American Journal 

 of Science," and four papers bearing the general title of " Re- 

 searches on the Platinum Metals " were published through 

 that medium in the years 1861, 1862, and 1864. 



During the winter of i862-'63, Eben N. Horsford, of the 

 Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University, delivered a 

 course of five lectures on " Munitions of War," and during the 

 same season Doctor Henry Wurtz, of New York, gave a 

 series of four lectures on " Gunpowder." Thereafter no lec- 

 tures on chemistry were delivered before the Smithsonian 

 Institution, and subsequent to 1865, owing to a fire that oc- 

 curred in the building on January 24 of that year, public lec- 

 ture courses were entirely abandoned. 



The appendix to the Report for 1856 contains a paper "On 

 Tables of the Constants of Nature and Art," by Charles Bab- 

 bage, in which it is said that these constants should include 



