552 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



while strikes and labor riots were going on in the surrounding 

 works, his men worked on, having heard the facts of the case from 

 him, and while the other oil-masters were almost without work- 

 men during the agricultural harvest season, his personal influence 

 was enough to keep his men at their work/' 



After the oil-distilling enterprise had failed, Mr. Williams went 

 to Sheffield as chemist to the Atlas Iron Works. He conducted 

 investigations on the manufacture of iron and steel, the effects of 

 impurities in the same, etc., the accounts of which are fully re- 

 ported in his book on the Manufacture of Iron and Steel. At 

 Sheffield he wrote and published his book on the Fuel of the Sun, 

 in which he assumed the existence of a universal atmosphere, 

 upon the amount of which the planets can condense about their 

 surfaces the densities of the planetary atmospheres depend. His 

 speculations have not been adopted by astronomers ; but the book 

 is said to have received some curious criticisms, and contradic- 

 tory from the mathematicians, who said that "the mathematical 

 part of the theory was correct, but there must be something wrong 

 with the chemistry " ; and from the chemists, who said that " the 

 chemistry was all right, but there must be something wrong with 

 the mathematics." 



In 1870 Mr. Williams moved to London, where he engaged in 

 lecturing at schools. In 1876 he gave what he called an object 

 lesson in geography, when he took his pupils through Norway. 

 An account of this journey is given in his book Through Norway 

 with Ladies. He afterward gave up teaching at schools and de- 

 voted his time chiefly to scientific writing, contributing Science 

 Notes to the Gentleman's Magazine, and papers and paragraphs 

 to Science Gossip, Knowledge, Iron, and other periodicals. The 

 more valuable series of these articles were collected and published 

 in the Chemistry of Cooking (published in The Popular Science 

 Monthly and by D. Appleton & Co.) ; Science in Short Chapters; 

 A Simple Treatise on Heat ; the History of the Manufacture of 

 Iron and Steel ; the Philosophy of Clothing, and Shorthand for 

 Everybody. His uncle and adoptive father, Zachariah Watkins, 

 by whom he had been helped in youth, to whom he dedicated The 

 Fuel of the Sun, and with whom he dined every Saturday for 

 twenty years, dying in 1889, left him an income that assured a 

 comfortable support, and, as he wrote to Dr. Taylor, editor of 

 Hardwicke's Science Gossip, he was able to begin his life work 

 at the age of sixty-nine. This life work was A Vindication of 

 Phrenology, on which he had been engaged, collecting material, 

 writing, and revising, for fifty years. It was left fairly com- 

 pleted, and is to be published by a London house. 



