CHAPTER VIII 

 THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN CHEMISTRY 



SMALL beginnings have great endings sometimes. 

 As a case in point, note what came of the small original 

 effort of a self-trained back-country Quaker youth named 

 John Dal ton, who along towards the close of the last 

 century became interested in the weather, and was led 

 to construct and use a crude rain-gauge to test the 

 amount of the waterfall. The simple experiments thus 

 inaugurated led to no fewer than two hundred thousand 

 recorded observations regarding the weather, which 

 formed the basis for some of the most epochal discov- 

 eries in meteorology, as we have seen. But this was 

 only a beginning. The simple rain-gauge pointed the 

 way to the most important generalization of our century 

 in a field of science with which, to the casual observer, 

 it might seem to have no alliance whatever. The won- 

 derful theory of atoms, on which the whole gigantic 

 structure of modern chemistry is founded, was the logical 

 outgrowth, in the mind of John Dalton, of those early 

 studies in meteorology. 



The way it happened was this : From studying the 

 rainfall, Dalton turned naturally to the complementary 

 process of evaporation. He was soon led to believe that 



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