1838-39. LABORATORY INCIDENTS. 171 



of his fellow-workers too small to last any of them long. He 

 requests, therefore, that his own be sent up, averring that other- 

 wise he will perish of mental starvation, and when the meta- 

 physicians hold an inquest on him, they shall find the organ of 

 the mind shrivelled into nothing. Apparatus, too, he finds ne- 

 cessary to carry on experiments for his Thesis, which must be 

 ready before April. Apparatus of all kinds being expensive in 

 London, he requests that the " corners" in the box to be sent 

 from home be filled with " the best of his bottles." The subject 

 of his Thesis was ' The Existence of Haloid Salts of the Electro- 

 Negative Metals in Solution ;' and shortly after this the parlour 

 of the brothers was amply stored in all available corners with 

 test-tubes, bottles, spirit-lamps, and solutions, which their little 

 Welsh landlady was trained and lectured into leaving untouched, 

 whatever amount of dust might accumulate on or around them. 

 The comparative leisure of the Christmas recess was eagerly 

 seized to help forward his own researches, besides working with 

 Dr. Playfair at having some salts crystallized for Professor 

 Graham, and ready against his return to town. On the day 

 preceding Christmas day, he was surprised at the unusual con- 

 dition of the laboratory. " I found it," he says, " in a sad mess, 

 a furnace knocked down, and a crew of bricklayers at work re- 

 pairing it, while a couple of blacksmiths set my teeth -on edge, 

 and wounded my musical ear, by filing and hammering at bars 

 of iron. To add to the confusion, a whole bevy of those water - 

 nymphs called charwomen, had taken possession of the place, 

 and had made themselves quite at home, presenting a spectacle 

 strange to a chemist's eyes, and according ill with the usual ac- 

 companiments of a laboratory. On a fireplace, sacred hitherto 

 to crucibles and retorts, and glasses redolent of fuming acids and 

 most potent but impotable fluids, stood a coffee-pot, wherein was 

 simmering the aromatic infusion which charwomen love. A jug 

 stood by, to refresh those who preferred the more common beve- 

 rage of tea, while in a pail, near the water- cistern, were lying 

 some roundish red bodies, which, after considerable hesitation 

 and rubbing of my spectacles, turned out to be potatoes. Arti- 

 cles of domestic comfort are rarely found in such a workshop as 

 ours, and excited my suspicion that more valuable creature com - 



