12 



forty years the boy you remember dabbling in acids, and 

 making bad smells, is counted one of the veterans of the 

 science. This is one of the rewards of a life of patient 

 work, and it is a pleasant recognition of honest and faithful 

 devotion to my early love. I feel that the volume now in 

 press will make the new gospel of geology and mineralogy, 

 and if I live to complete my miueralogical text-book, I shall 

 do for the mineral what Darwin did for the organic world, or 

 rather I have done that already, and I shall do for it in the 

 next book what De Candolle did for botany. I shall be sixty 

 years old in September, and then hope to have my new book 

 bound and off my hands. I don't feel old yet, but I do feel 

 as if I had done a great deal of work, and as if my training 

 had been such that I am now able to preserve it all in such a 

 shape that it will not be lost to the world." 



There runs through Hunt's philosophy, as a fundamental 

 idea, the unity of nature and natural processes, this unity 

 extending from the simplest bodies to the most complicated, 

 comprising the organic as well as the inorganic world, blend- 

 ing physical processes with chemical, and binding int 

 harmonious system the laws which regulate and the for<-> 

 which control and the substances which compose the most 

 remote bodies of the universe, as well as those which come 

 more immediately within the reach of human research. His 

 mature views were enunciated in U A New Basis for Chem- 

 istry," a chemical philosophy published in 1887, a book oi 

 such significance that Prof. W. Spring, of Liege, translated it 

 into French, and added a preface from which we extract the 

 following: u Mr. Sterry Hunt endeavors to lift the whole 

 structure of chemistry above the plane of the atomic theory 

 as received from Dalton, an hypothesis utterly insufficient to 

 explain more than one fact. 



" To Hunt a compound body is not the resultant of the 

 mere juxtaposition of the material ultimates in which are 

 combined in some manner the aggregation of properties to 

 which we apply the term matter. But according to his views, 

 it is rather due to an interpenetration of matter, an identified- 



