124 T. S. Hunt—Celestial Chemistry. 
tion of the writings of our great Natural Philosopher, in the 
light of the scientific progress of the last generation, renders still 
more evident the wonderful prevision of him who already, two 
centuries since, had anticipated most of the recent speculations 
and conclusions regarding cosmic chemistry. 
As an introduction to the inquiries before us, and in order to 
show the real significance of the speculations of Newton, it 
will be necessary to review, somewhat at length, the history of 
Benjamin Brodie, of Oxford, and the present writer, and subse- 
quently developed and extended by-the latter. In part I of 
Royal Institution on The Chemistry of the Primeval Earth, 
which was delivered May 31, 1867. A stenographic report 0 
the lecture, revised by the author, was published in the Chem- 
ical News of June 21, 1867, and in the Proceedings of the 
Royal Institution. Therein, I considered the chemistry of neb- 
ule, sun and stars in the combined light of spectroscopi¢ 
analysis and Deville’s researches on dissociation, and con- 
cluded with the generalization that the ‘“‘breaking-up of com: 
ounds, or dissociation of elements, by intense heat is a principle 
of nniversal application, so that we may suppose that all the 
elements which make up the sun, or our planet, would, when 80 
intensely heated as to be in the gaseous condition which all 
even give us evidence of matter still more elemental than that 
revealed in the experiments of the laboratory, where we can 
