Bryan and William Higgins. 225 



made out the laws so far, that when he knew the quanti- 

 tative analysis of a salt, he could tell its quantitative 

 decomposition with another ; but he never saw it with 

 sufficient clearness to be able to express the combining 

 quantities each by its own distinct number, nor does he 

 appear ever to have proceeded far enough to be able to 

 assign a cause for the phenomena or to connect it with 

 any fundamental idea.' 



' He was the founder of the systematic study of 

 Stoechiometry. He was an illustrator of one of its most 

 important laws, and a defender of regularity in nature. 

 His scientific life was laborious, his love of science sincere, 

 and in all respects he seems to have been a man of high 

 character. After reading his works, and coming occasion- 

 ally on a sentence which makes us for the moment believe 

 that he has discovered a greater law than we can now give 

 to him, and finding that during his whole life he was just 

 on the point of discovering the present atomic laws or 

 laws of equivalents, one feels that perhaps he was the only 

 man that deserved to discover them, having given himself 

 up entirely to that purpose another combatant who died 

 before victory.' 



So little hold had these ideas on chemists, existing as 

 they did in a few minds groping uncertainly, that Berthol- 

 let in 1805 ('Journal de Physique,' vol. lix. ) ridicules the 

 idea of the molecules uniting by a leap from o to 9 to 12 

 to 25 per cent. Proust has actually to defend definite pro- 

 portions against the backward thinking of Berthollet, who 

 advocated the superior power of quantity without definite- 

 ness. It is strange how chemists still cling to this power 

 of mere bulk, not seeing it as a law more allied to cohesion, 



Q 



