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' RULE FOR PRIORITY OF CLAIM. 435 
to be expected from a rival or competitor, however emi- 
nent his reputation may already be. Cavendish could 
scarcely listen to people on business, when they went to 
consult him about the investment of his twenty-five or 
thirty millions (a million sterling or more); but you 
now know whether he felt equally indifferent about ex- 
periments. It would not be requiring too much, then, if 
the historians of science were not to receive, as available 
titles to property, any but written titles ; perhaps, I ought 
rather to say, any but published titles.. Then, and only 
then, would those quarrels end, which are continually 
recommencing, by which national vanity generally suf- 
fers ; then the name of Watt would resume in the history 
of chemistry the high post that is his due. 
When the solution of a question of priority, like the 
one we have been discussing, is founded on the most 
attentive examination of printed memoirs, and on a minute 
comparison of dates, it assumes the character of a real 
demonstration. Still I feel myself bound to give a rapid 
glance at the various difficulties to which some very good 
intellects appear to me to have attached importance. 
How can it be admitted, I have been asked, that in the 
midst of an immense whirlpool of commercial affairs, that 
preoccupied by a multitude of lawsuits, that obliged to 
provide by daily inventions against the difficulties of a 
rising manufactory, Watt could find the time to follow 
the progress of chemistry step by step, to make fresh ex- 
periments, to propose explanations which the masters of 
the science themselves would not have thought of ? 
To this difficulty I shall make a short but conclusive 
reply: I hold in my hands the copy of an active corre- 
spondence principally relative to chemical topics, that 
Watt kept up during the years 1782, 1783, and 1784, 
