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Section B.—CHEMICAL SCIENCE. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SEcTION—Professor T. E. THorrn, B.Sc., Ph.D., F.LS8., 
Treas.C.8, 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Lesps has one most notable association with chemistry of which she is justly proud. 
In the month of September 1767 Dr. Joseph Priestley took up his ahode in this town. 
The son of a Yorkshire cloth-dresser, he was born in 1735 at Fieldhead, a village 
about six miles hence. His relatives, who were strict Calvinists, on discovering 
his fondness for books, sent him to the Academy at Daventry to be trained 
for the ministry. In spite of his poverty and of certain natural disadvantages 
of speech and manner, he gradually acquired, more especially by his controver- 
sial and theological writings, a considerable influence in Dissenting circles. A 
pressing invitation and the offer of one hundred guineas a year, induced him to 
accept an invitation to take charge of the congregation of Mill Hill Chapel here. 
He was already known to science by his ‘ History of Electricity,’ and the effort 
was made to attach him still more closely to its cause by the offer of an appoint- 
ment as naturalist to Cook’s Second Expedition to the South Seas. But thanks 
to the intervention of some worthy ecclesiastics on the Board of Longitude who 
had the direction of the business, and who, as Professor Huxley once put it, ‘ pos- 
sibly feared that a Socinian might undermine that piety which in the days of Com- 
modore Trunnion so strikingly characterised sailors,’ he was allowed to remain in 
Leeds, where, as he tells us in his Memoirs, he continued six years, ‘ very happy 
with a liberal, friendly, and harmonious congregation,’ to whom his services (of which 
he was not sparing) were very acceptable. ‘In Leeds,’ he says, ‘I had no unreason- 
able prejudices to contend with, and I had full scope for every kind-of exertion.’ ? 
We have every reason to feel grateful to the ‘ worthy ecclesiastics,’ since their 
action indirectly occasioned Priestley to turn his attention to chemistry. The 
accident of living near a brewery led him to study the properties of ‘ fixed air,’ or 
carbonic acid, which is abundantly formed in the process of fermentation, and which 
_at that time was the only gas whose separate and independent existence had been 
definitely established. T'rom this happy accident sprang that extraordinary sue- 
cession of discoveries which earned for their author the title of the Father of 
Pneumatic Chemistry, and which were destined to completely change the aspect 
of chemical theory and to give it a new and unexpected development. ; 
I have been led to make this allusion to Priestley, not so much on account of 
his connection with this place as for the reason that, asit seems to me, there has 
been a disposition to obscure his true relation to the marvellous development of 
chemical science which made the close of the last century memorable in the history 
of learning. Our distinguished fellow-worker, M. Berthelot, the Perpetual Secre- 
_ | Leeds still enjoys one of the fruits of Priestley’s insatiable power of work 
in her admirable Proprietary Library. He seems to have suggested its formation 
and was its first honorary secretary. 
1890. 3D 
