CAVENDISH AND LAVOISIER. 431 



year ; but the letter remained in the archives of the 

 Society.* It is inserted in the seventy-fourth volume of 

 the Philosophical Transactions, under its true date of 

 the 26th of April, 1783. It is found there inserted in a 

 letter from Watt to De Luc, dated 26th of November, 

 1783, distinguished by inverted commas, applied by the 

 Secretary of the Royal Society. 



I do not ask for indulgence on this profusion of details, 

 it will be perceived that a minute comparison of dates 

 could alone bring the whole truth to light ; and that the 

 subject is one of those discoveries that do most honour to 

 the human mind. *. 



Among the pretenders to this fruitful discovery, we 

 are now going to see arise the two greatest chemists 

 boasted of by France and England. Everybody must 

 have already named to themselves Lavoisier and Caven- 

 dish. 



The date of the public reading of the memoir in which 

 Lavoisier detailed his experiments, in which he devel- 

 oped his views on the production of water by the com- 

 bustion of oxygen and hydrogen, is posterior by two 

 months to Watt's letter (already analyzed) being depos- 

 ited in the archives of the Royal Society of London. 



The celebrated memoir by Cavendish, entitled Experi- 

 ments on Air, is more recent still ; it was read the 15th 

 of January, 1784. It might excite reasonable surprise 



* To this diffident and philosophical document we refer the reader; 

 in it Watt states that he feels great reluctance to lay his thoughts 

 "before the public in their present indigested state, and without 

 having been able to bring them to the test of such experiments as 

 would confirm or refute them." M. Arago, in rendering portions of 

 the paper, resorts to the exact chemical language of the present day; 

 whence he uses hydrogene for inflammable air and phlogiston, and 

 oxygene for dephlogisticated air. Translator. 



