l8o PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



ers, but to give them full effect it was necessary that they 

 should be aroused by a great and interesting subject, and the 

 effect was heightened by the injection of antagonism. He 

 would then discourse with commanding ability, and his 

 hearers were generally as ready to listen as he to speak. He 

 was a man of unbounded rectitude, a faithful friend, and a 

 lover of his country and its best interests, without thought of 

 personal emolument or political advancement. He was a volu- 

 minous scientific writer. For many years his contributions to 

 the American Journal of Science were more numerous than 

 those of any other correspondent. The full list of them in- 

 cludes about one hundred and fifty articles, in forty-eight vol- 

 umes of that journal, the record of the titles of which occupies 

 five columns in the General Index of the first fifty volumes. 

 Besides notices of the various substances he discovered or ex- 

 perimented with, and descriptions of apparatus, we find among 

 these articles some that touch the principles of chemical and 

 physical philosophy as on the nature of acids and salts ; con- 

 cerning Faraday's views on atoms ; on chemical nomenclature, 



. a subject which is also discussed in a letter to Berzelius; on 

 some inferences from the phenomena of the spark in Thomp- 

 son's work on heat and electricity ; on the error that electric 



* machines must communicate with the earth; on a new theory 

 of galvanism ; on the cause of heat ; a reply to Prof. D. Olm- 

 sted's views on the materiality of heat; Reply to Matter is 

 Heavy, as demonstrated by W. Whewell ; on meteorological 

 topics storms of the Atlantic coast; reviews of Redfield's 

 theory of storms and of Dove's essay on storms ; an account 

 of a storm or tornado in Rhode Island, August, 1838, "and 

 others"; on Causes of Storm, Tornado, and Waterspout; 

 among accounts of experiments and new methods blasting 

 rocks by galvanic ignition ; apparatus for producing ebullition 

 by cold ; process for fulminating powder, consisting of cyano- 

 gen and calcium; mode of obtaining the specific gravity of 

 gases; analysis of gaseous mixtures; method of dividing 

 glass by friction ; and apparatus for decomposition and re- 

 composition of water. He was also author of a Brief View of 

 the Policy and Resources of the United States (1810); Chem- 

 ical Apparatus and Manipulations (1836) ; Compendium of the 

 Course of Chemical Instruction in the Medical Department of 

 the University of Pennsylvania (1840) ; Memoir on the Ex- 



