Professor Thomas Thomson. 91 



where lucrative patents have resulted from a simple state- 

 ment or foot-note, often original, on the part of the author. 

 A fact of this kind in the " Animal Chemistry 1 ' led Mr Robert 

 Pattison to his ingenious patent invention of lactarin, a pre- 

 paration of casein from milk, for fixing ultramarine on cotton 

 cloth ; and Dr Thomson's systematic plan of describing all 

 the characters of bodies in detail led Henry Rose, of Berlin, 

 to the discovery of niobium and pelopium, two new metals. 

 From the fragments of four imperfect crystals of certain 

 tantalites, as the mineral dealers who sold them to him 

 termed them, he was enabled to make some analyses, and to 

 take a series of specific gravities, which he published in a 

 paper " On the Minerals containing Columbium," in his ne- 

 phew Dr R. D. Thomson's " Records of General Science," 

 vol. iv., p. 407, in 1836. He found that these minerals pos- 

 sessed an analogous constitution, but their specific gravity 

 differs. He termed them, toreylifce, columbite, tantalite, and 

 ferrofjantalite. In making his experiments, he expended all 

 the material he possessed, and he had passed the great cli- 

 macteric. Professor Rose, struck with the facts, examined 

 the minerals upon a greater scale, and, after immense labour, 

 shewed that not only columbic or tantalic acid was present 

 in these minerals, but likewise two new acids, niobic and 

 pelopic acids. Instances of this kind of contribution made 

 by Dr Thomson to chemistry might be indefinitely particu- 

 larised. About 1802 he invented the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, 

 in which he introduced the oxygen and hydrogen into one 

 vessel, but the whole apparatus having blown up and nearly 

 proved fatal to him, he placed the gases in separate gas- 

 holders. His apparatus of this description has been annually 

 exhibited in the Chemistry class of the College of Glasgow, and 

 has been figured in Dr R. D. Thomson's " School Chemistry.'' 

 At that time he made many experiments on its powers of 

 fusion, but as Dr Hare had invented an apparatus at the 

 same time, and published his experiments, Dr Thomson did 

 no more than exhibit the apparatus in his lectures. 7. In 

 August 1804, in a paper on lead, he first published his new 

 nomenclature of the oxides and acids, in which Latin and 

 Greek numerals were made to denote the number of atoms 



