( J8 On the Great Principles either Suggested 



On the Great Principles either Suggested or Worked out by 

 the late celebrated Dr William Front, F.R.S., fyc. By Dr 

 Daubeny, Professor of Botany, Oxford.* Communicated 

 by the Author. 



In noticing the advances made to our knowledge of the 

 functions of life, through the instrumentality of chemistry, 

 as illustrated by a new discovery of Baron LiebigX of which 

 he had given a short account, Dr Daubeny could not refrain 

 from dwelling a little upon the scientific merits of an old and 

 valued friend of his own, now deceased, who led the way in 

 this path of research, and deserves to be commemorated, both 

 for his important contributions to chemistry in general, and 

 likewise for the light which his researches first cast upon many 

 obscure processes of the animal economy. He alluded to Dr 

 Prout, whose labours, however, in the cause of science, he 

 would not take up the time of the Society by particularising, 

 inasmuch as a pretty faithful and detailed abstract of his 

 principal papers had already been given to the world in a late 

 number of the Edinburgh Medical Journal. \ He would, how- 

 ever, briefly allude to two qualities which eminently distin- 

 guished his philosophical character, and which, by their happy 

 combination, enabled him to render subservient to the unfold- 

 ing of grand general truths those minute pathological inquiries 

 which his profession prompted him to undertake, but every 

 one of which, when once entered upon, was worked out by him 

 with the patience and exactness of a philosophical problem. 



The first of these characteristics was that capacity for ac- 

 curate observation, which, coupled as it was in him with the 

 most conscientious regard to truth, inspired such a confidence 

 in his published results, that their correctness has seldom 

 been impugned by those who, with the lights of improved 

 knowledge, have since followed in his footsteps. It is, indeed, 

 the great boast of Liebig, that he has so improved the method 

 of analysing organic bodies, that a young man of ordinary 



* Read before the Aahmolean Society of Oxford, February 3, 1852. 

 t July 1851. 



