ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XLV 
the “3st Query,” under which this passage occurs in the book of | 
“‘Opticks,”’ is occupied with certain chemical analyses which Newton 
had made in his laboratory. Newton, we know, was an alchemist, 
and spent laborious days and nights in trying to discover the secret 
by which base metals might be rendered noble; but I can hardly 
concur with Prof. Jevons when he says that Newton’s “lofty powers 
of deductive investigation were wholly useless” in the conduct of 
these experiments.* There is some gold at the bottom of even 
his alchemical crucible. He was the first to put the conception of 
atoms in their rightful logical connection with the phenomena of 
practical chemistry. 
It would here be in order to follow Joseph Boscovich in his pro- 
found theory of the constitution of matter, if in doing so we might 
not fall into the danger of drifting too far from the atom considered 
as a minim of corporeal singleness. With him the atom is a point 
of attractive and repulsive forces rather than an ultimate physical 
element; and as it was really the atom of chemical physics which 
Democritus posited in his mind without knowing it, thus setting ap 
the altar of science to an “unknown god,” it is time that we 
should hasten towards the epoch when Chemistry came to rend the 
vail from the face of this Isis whom the Greek atomists had so long 
and so ignorantly worshipped. 
It is in the writings of the Hon. Robert Boyle, pleasantly de- 
scribed by his Irish biographer, with a somewhat Irish collocation 
of ideas, as “ Father of Chemistry and brother of the Earl of Cork,” 
that we find the period of transition, when the old order of meta- 
physical atoms is changing to give place to the new order of 
physical atoms as weighed and measured by modern chemistry. In 
his essay on “ The Intestine Motions of the Particles of Quiescent 
Bodies,” } as also in his essays on Fluidity and Firmness, he threw 
out some positive ideas on the old atomic philosophy. He sup- 
poses it to be of Phcenician derivation, and even tries to effect a 
reconciliation between that philosophy and the Cartesian notion of 
continuous substance by drawing on the maieria subtilis of the 
French philosopher (which was conceived to pass constantly, like a 
*Jevons: Principles of Science, vol. II, p. 188. 
t Opticks, Book III, Query 31. 
t Robert Boyle’s Works, vol. I, p. 444. 
