Wenzel. 223 



In 1775 Dr. Bryan Higgins of Dublin, lecturing in 

 Greek Street, Soho, London, made such a remarkable 

 advance in opinions on atoms that one wonders that for 

 thirty years no one paid attention to him. Even now he is 

 almost ignored. 



He says, * The attraction subsisting between elementary 

 atoms is more forcible in one direction or axis of each 

 atom than in any other direction, and there is a polarity 

 in all matter whatever.' 



How much theory this is the beginning of ! How little 

 has it been acknowledged ! 



7. ' That the attraction of bodies enumerated as 

 distinct properties of matter or laws of nature, are nothing 

 more than the sums of the attraction of their elementary 

 atoms, or those forces concentrated in a certain degree by 

 the pressure of repellent atoms, or those forces exerted to 

 the greatest advantage in bodies whose primary elemen- 

 tary attractions are strongest, and whose primary elemen- 

 tary atoms are also arranged in polar order.' 



Bryan Higgins started so well that we are astonished 

 at his failure, but as William Higgins says of himself 

 in 1791, ' Est quadam prodire tenus si non datur ultra;' 

 even the second does not seem to have satisfied himself 

 when he wrote as a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, 

 although he claimed more when he vindicated himself 

 in 1814, writing as Professor of Chemistry to the Dublin 

 Society. These men are not mentioned in some acounts 

 of the period, but we have numerous quotations from men 

 who had no idea of a science of chemistry long after it was 

 fermenting in men's minds. The popular men of science 

 for the time are often the favourite speakers of the time, 

 who may or who may not have had real originality ; if 



