A HISTORY OF METABOLISM 29 



official, a tax gatherer, and he had also been associated with the national 

 manufacture of gunpowder, the quality of which he had greatly improved. 

 He purchased a large landed estate and made experiments in scientific 

 agriculture, doubling the wheat crop, quintupling the number of beasts 

 on the land and earning thereby the enduring gratitude of the peasants. 

 However, as before remarked, he had incurred the bitter hatred of Marat 

 and he was a tax gatherer. In November, 1793, he was arrested at the 

 Arsenal in his laboratory there, upon which he had spent a large portion 

 of his fortune. Just a little while before, in August of the same year, 

 the Academic des Sciences had been closed as inimical to the welfare 

 of the state. Les amis du peuple are notoriously suspicious of the "intelli- 

 genzia," and the Academic was abolished. 



Just prior to his execution Lavoisier wrote to a friend, "I have had a 

 sufficiently long career, always a very happy one, and I believe that my 

 memory will be thought of with some regret and perhaps as having some- 

 thing of glory. What more could I desire? The circumstances which 

 surround me would probably lead to an uncomfortable old age. ... It is 

 certainly true that all the social virtues, important services to the country, 

 a useful career employed in promoting art and human knowledge, have 

 not sufficed to save me from a sinister end or to prevent me from perish- 

 ing as a criminal." 



One of the charges against Lavoisier was that he had allowed the 

 collection of taxes upon the water contained in tobacco. On May 8, 1794, 

 at the age of fifty years, he was tried and found guilty. Twenty-eight 

 fermiers-generaux were executed in the Place de la Republique at the 

 same time. He witnessed the execution of his father-in-law, Paulze, who 

 was fourth on the list, and he was the fifth upon whom the ax of the 

 guillotine fell. 



Such was the Terror. 



His friend Lagrange whispered that night to an intimate, "It took 

 but an instant to cut off his head; a hundred years will not suffice to 

 produce one like it !" 



Writing a hundred years later, Berthelot (;') (1890) exclaimed, "It is 

 our right to admire the positive work which he accomplished. The uni- 

 versal judgment of the civilized world increasingly reveres his establish- 

 ment of chemistry, one of the fundamental sciences, upon a fixed and 

 definite basis. There is no grander accomplishment in the history of 

 civilization and hence the name of Lavoisier will live forever in the 

 memory of humanity." 



It is interesting to consider the differences in the lives of the men 

 concerned in the great discoveries of the last quarter of the eighteenth 

 century. Priestley, an indigent clergyman ; Cavendish, of whom it was 

 said that he was the most wealthy of learned men and the most learned of 

 the wealthy ; Scheele, a poor Swedish apothecary ; and Lavoisier, a man of 



