322 JOHN MATOW: CHEMIST AND PHYSICIAN. 



in the church, of St. Paul, Covent Grarden." A most miserable 

 conclusion to a life of splendid achievement and brilliant 

 promise. '^' But his works lived after him ; within two years of 

 his death, his tracts were republished at the Hague (1681) with 

 some success ; for a century later Dr. Beddoes* had considerable 

 difficulty in finding a copy of the Oxford edition anywhere, except 

 in the public libraries, but he said, ''copies of another edition 

 are more common abroad." 



In 1692 Stanford Wolferstan published a book in which 

 Mayow's views were adopted ; and they were also taken up by 

 Morhof, Baglivi, and Verheyen,f among other great teachers on 

 the continent. He was studied and quoted by Hales, Haller, 

 and Scheele, and in the opinion of Dr. Brande*, a man well 

 qualified to judge, "his views and language were adopted by 

 Newton." " The sketch of a theory of chemical attractions 

 given by that philosopher in the queries annexed to the third 

 book of optics is nearly in the language and quite in the spirit 

 and meaning of his predecessor Mayow." 



But whilst his work lived and grew, his reputation faded ; 

 nor is this much to be wondered at, for it was not until Lavoisier 

 had illuminated the field of chemistry that the importance of the 

 positions Mayow had taken up could be appreciated. Then he 

 suddenly became famous. Dr. Beddoes published in 1790 a very 

 readable book, entitled Chemical Experiments and Opinions, 

 extracted from a worlc published in the last century. In 1793 Sherer 

 published in Yienna a proof that Mayow had a century earlier 

 established the foundations of modern and physiological chem- 

 istry. And in 1798 Dr. Yeats printed Observations on the claims 

 of the moderns to some discoveries in chemistry and physiology ; an 

 exhaustive book in which Mayow's claims are laboriously but 

 convincingly displayed. The effect of these publications was to 

 rank Mayow with Hooke and Boyle as one of the three great 



*" His too early death retarded by a century tlie dawn of modern chemistry." 

 — Hoefer. 



"It is probable, that if Mayow had not died a young man, or if Hooke had 

 found leisure to prosecute his views, the theory of phlogiston would never have 

 been propounded." — Eodwell, Birth of Chemistry. 



f The only reference I can find in the edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 

 published in 1798, is a quotation of Mayow's own words quoted thr^ough Verheyen. 



