THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



but equally decisive. At first the new chemistry was 

 opposed by such great men as Black, of " latent heat " 

 fame ; Rutherford, the discoverer of nitrogen ; and Cav- 

 endish, the inventor of the pneumatic trough and the 

 discoverer of the composition of water, not to mention 

 a coterie of lesser lights ; but one by one the} 7 wavered 

 and went over to the enemy. Oddly enough, the 

 doughtiest and most uncompromising of all the cham- 

 pions of the old " phlogistic " ideas was Dr. Priestley, 

 the very man whose discovery of oxygen had paved the 

 way for the "antiphlogistic" movement a fact which 

 gave rise to Cuvier's remark that Priestley was undoubt- 

 edly one of the fathers of modern chemistry, but a 

 father who never wished to recognize his daughter. 



A most extraordinary man was this Dr. Priestley. 

 Davy said of him, a generation later, that no other per- 

 son ever discovered so many new and curious substances 

 as he ; yet to the last he was only an amateur in science, 

 his profession being the ministry. There is hardly an- 

 other case in history of a man not a specialist in science 

 accomplishing so much in original research as did Joseph 

 Priestley, the chemist, physiologist, electrician ; the 

 mathematician, logician, and moralist ; the theolo- 

 gian, mental philosopher, and political economist. He 

 took all knowledge for his field ; but how he found time 

 for his numberless researches and multifarious writings, 

 along with his every-day duties, must ever remain a 

 mystery to ordinary mortals. 



That this marvellously receptive, flexible mind should 

 have refused acceptance to the clearly logical doctrines 

 of the new chemistry seems equally inexplicable. But 

 so it was. To the very last, after all his friends had 

 capitulated, Priestley kept up the fight. From America, 



34 



