CH. xvi. JOHN MAYOW. 129 



This opinion he discussed at the Oxford meetings, and a 

 young physician named John Mayow listened very eagerly, 

 and then went home and set himself to try and find out 

 what this strange power in the air could be, without which 

 neither fire nor animals could exist. 



Mayow's Experiments on Respiration and Com- 

 bustion, 1645-1679. John Mayow's private history is very 

 short. He was born in Cornwall in 1645; ne became a 

 fellow of All Souls', Oxford, and practised as a physician in 

 Bath ; and finally he died at the house of an apothecary in 

 York Street, Covent Garden, in 1679, before he was thirty- 

 four years of age. This is all we know about his life ; but 

 he must have been a diligent worker and a real lover of 

 science, for though he died so young he left behind him an 

 account of a number of experiments and discoveries which 

 entitled him to be called the greatest chemist of the seven- 

 teenth century. I wish we could go through all his 

 experiments, for they form a most beautiful lesson of the 

 earnest and painstaking way in which God's laws should be 

 investigated. Mayow never made a careless experiment; he 

 never thrust in his own guesses when it was possible to work 

 out the truth ; he went on patiently step by step, taking 

 every care to avoid mistakes, and never resting till he had 

 got to the bottom of his difficulties. Let us now take some 

 of his experiments on combustion, or burning, and respiration, 

 or breathing, and try and follow them as carefully as he did. 



It seemed to him clear from the experiments of Boyle 

 and Hooke that there must be something in the air which 

 gave rise to flame and breath, and that this could only be a 

 small part of the air, since a candle when put under a bell- 

 glass went out long before all the air was gone. He first of 

 all satisfied himself by experiments that this gas which 

 burnt, and which he called fire-air, was not only in the 



