Professor Thomas Thomson. 93 



tented with translations from the French, and hence it was 

 believed on the Continent that ' : Britain possessed scarcely a 

 scientific chemist." That all his contemporaries viewed his 

 plans as highly philosophic cannot be affirmed. There are 

 some men who, having no mental powers of arrangement in 

 themselves, discover in a systematic treatise only a compila- 

 tion possessing the generic characters of matter ; while 

 those who can pry below the surface, on the other hand, 

 know that the art of arranging is one of the most difficult 

 tasks of the philosopher ; that it requires a comprehensive- 

 ness of mind, a clearness of judgment, and a patience of 

 labour, which fall to the lot of a small number of the human 

 race. When we recollect that many of these remarkable 

 views began to be devised by the self-taught chemist, in a 

 narrow close in the High Street of Edinburgh, the author 

 being in the receipt of a salary of £50 a year, from which he 

 sent £15 to his aged parents ; when we contrast such a pic- 

 ture with the costly education and refined apparatus of the 

 modern laboratory, it is impossible to avoid the inference 

 that Britain has just lost a genius of no common order. 



One immediate result of the publication of his " System,'' 

 was the appropriation of their due merit to respective dis- 

 coverers, and especially to British chemists, who had been 

 overlooked in the Continental treatises. It was the subject 

 of our memoir who thus first imparted to us the true history 

 of chemistry, and in doing so often gave offence to disap- 

 pointed individuals ; but the honesty of his nature and his 

 unswerving love of truth never allowed him for a moment to 

 sacrifice, even in his own case, the fact to the fallacy. 



During the first years of this century, he discovered many 

 new compounds and minerals, as chloride of sulphur, allanite, 

 sodalite, &c. ; but to give a list of the numerous salts which 

 he first formed and described during his onward career, 

 would be difficult, as he scarcely ever treated of them in 

 separate papers, but introduced them into the body of his 

 u System" without any claim to their discovery. His exact 

 mind was more directed towards accurate knowledge and 

 principles than to novelties, merely for their own sake, al- 

 though there is probably no chemist who has added so many 



