52 Henry Riddell on 



I cannot forget the great admiration which our own Andrews had 

 for Black's work, nor do I forget that it was in Andrews' address 

 to the Chemical Section of the British Association in 1871 that 

 Lavoisier's three letters to Black were first printed. Andrews 

 himself had followed up Black's work by a remarkable series of 

 investigations upon the latent heat of vapours, followed later by 

 his world-famous enquiry into the relation between the liquid 

 and gaseous states of matter. It is scarcely too much to say 

 that these great advances in science were suggested by and 

 partially at least due to the original labours of Dr. Black. Anyone 

 who will read Black's lectures as edited by Eobison and published 

 in 1803, will agree that they are models of what such lectures 

 should be. It is really hard to say whether science has lost or 

 gained by Black's devotion to his teaching duties. It is certain 

 that, relieved from this constant strain, he would have gone on 

 from discovery to discovery, and perhaps some of those great 

 results afterwards obtained by other chemists would have been 

 the fruit of his genius. The great clearness of teaching, combined 

 with the care to state nothing as proved which seemed in any way 

 hypothetical ; the fact that all knowledge lying Avithin the scope 

 of his lectures was carefully studied, digested and taught in the 

 plainest and simplest language, had such an effect in inspiring his 

 pupils that it is possible that the seeds thus sown brought a 

 greater crop than could ever have come from the brain and 

 exertion of one man devoted to research. Surely a great teacher 

 is as great an asset to the world as a great investigator, and in 

 Black's case the two could not be combined. I shall speak a little 

 further about this when I deal with his life as a man, and will 

 leave the personal now to say something about the actual 

 researches which first brought him fame, and the circumstances 

 under which they were made. 



Black left school in Belfast in 1746 and entered Glasgow 

 University at the age of 18. It was not an early age as matters 

 went then. Those were the days of precocious youth, though 

 not so generally precocious as was William Thompson many years 



