18 



thus of necessity gathered from his wide reading germs of 

 thought, of which when fully developed he forgot the source 

 of inspiration. On the other hand, his own writings contain 

 suggestions which have as unconsciously been adopted and 

 expounded by others who have failed to give credit to 

 the creative mind. For instance, the fundamental idea of 

 Lord Kelvin's address to the British Association in Toronto in 

 1897 is contained in Hunt's paper, " The Primeval Atmos- 

 phere," presented at first meeting of the American Associa- 

 tion for the Advancement of Science, after the War (1866). 

 He there shows that a layer of ordinary coal one metre in 

 thickness would suffice to convert into carbonic acid the 

 whole of the oxygen of the atmosphere. 



His courage was indomitable to the last. After condens- 

 ing and summarizing the conclusions of forty years of 

 thought in his New Basis of Chemistry, published in 1887. he 

 set himself to applying to mineralogy his theory of conden- 

 sation more systematically and thoroughlv than he had done 

 in bis tentative papers in a natural system of mineralogy and 

 the classification of silicates. He wrote this work when con- 

 fined to his room by mortal lingering illness and hardly able 

 to crawl from his bed to his desk. He needed but few books 

 to supplement his memory in preparing the genera and species 

 under which he ranged the principal individuals of the 

 mi IK-. nil kingdom. And no sooner was his arduous task 

 completed, than he planned and commenced another work 

 which he entitled The History of an Earth. In it his purpose 

 was to elaborate his crenitic theory and trace throughout the 

 growth of the earth's crust the influence of water as a chemi- 

 -cal agent, under heat and pressure, in decomposing the 

 fundamental rocks of our globe, and out of these decayed 

 ingredients building up the older crystalline rocks and creat- 

 ing most of our mineral deposits. As these Azoic rocks 

 came to be destroyed by telluric agencies, of which water 

 was the most potent, he would have shown how the new 

 world, fit for the support of vegetable and animal life, was 

 created from the ashes of the older rocks. No writer could 



