iv Preface 



elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London^ 

 having been proposed by Hooke. 



His philosophical writings consist of five treatises^ 

 written in Latin. Two of these — 



De respiratione ; and 

 De rachiiide 

 — were first published at Oxford in 1668. A revised 

 edition of these two, together with the other three — 

 De sal-nitro et spiritit nitro-aereo ; 

 De respiratione foetus in utero et ovo ; and 

 De moiu miisciilari et spiritibus animalihiis 

 — was published at Oxford in 1674. 



Mayow was thus twenty-five years old when he 

 published his tracts on respiration and on rickets^ 

 and he died at the early age of thirty-six. 



Mayow's works were not much noticed in his own 

 time, and speedily fell into almost total oblivion^ 

 Hales, in his Vegetable Staticks (London, 1727), being 

 the only author who refers to his writings in the 

 earlier part of the eighteenth century. They were 

 reprinted in Latin at the Hague in 1681 and at 

 Geneva in 1685. A German translation appeared at 

 Jena in 1799 and a French translation at Paris in 

 1840. 



After the great revolution in chemical theory which 

 followed the discovery of oxygen, Mayow's book was 

 discovered in old libraries, where it had remained 

 disregarded for a hundred years ; and those who 

 discovered it were astonished to see that the new 

 chemistry, which was rapidly conquering the scientific 

 world, was to be found in this old book. As far as we 

 know, Dr Thomas Beddoes was the first distinctly to- 

 recognise Mayow's claim. Dr Beddoes published his 

 discovery of Mayow in a letter to Dr Edmund 

 Goodwyn, with an Analysis of Mayow'' s Chemical 



