528 



and a baronet, and he was also invested with the Russian order of 

 Alexander, and the Persian order of the Lion and Sun. His gentle- 

 manly address and the agreeableness of his manners rendered him a 

 general favourite in society. He died at his seat. Hall Barn Park, 

 on the iSth day of the present month, in the 75th year of his age, and 

 is succeeded in his title and estates by his son Frederick Arthur 

 Gore, the present baronet, who was born in the year 1825. 



JoHX Dalton was born on the 5th of September, 1766, at Eagles- 

 field, near Cockermouth, in the Cumberland Lake district. He 

 passed some years as teacher of mathematics in a school at Kendal, 

 and removed in 1793 to Manchester, where he continued to reside 

 during the whole of his after-life. 



It was doubtless his long residence among the lakes and mountains 

 of Cumberland, and his consequent early familiarity with the ever- 

 varying conditions of the atmosphere observable in tliat district, 

 that gave the first impulse to his genius, and materially influenced 

 his subsequent scientific career. His earliest important publication 

 was a Treatise on Meteorology, which furnished a clear compendium 

 of all the facts then ascertained, and made known various original 

 views, especially on the altitude of the Aurora Borealis. From ob- 

 serving and recording the sensible atmospheric changes, the pheno- 

 mena of dew, of clouds and of temperature, he was naturally impelled 

 to inquire into the constitution of the atmosphere, and more gene- 

 rally of mixed elastic fluids, and into the theory of evaporation and 

 the laws of heat. On these questions he made public, through the 

 Transactions of the Mancliester Society, a series of experimental 

 memoirs, of which it is impossible to over-estimate the importance. 

 His first conception of the mutual relations of mixed gases was, that 

 each gas stood in the relation of a vacuum to the particles of all other 

 gases ; but in his Xew System of Chemical Philosophy he subse- 

 quently relaxed the strictness of this original proposition, by con- 

 ceding that the particles presented some mechanical impediment to 

 connningling. He ascertained the form of the vapours of water and 

 some other liquids at different temperatures, and dispelled by these 

 experiments and others of equal importance the obscurity in which 

 the theory of vaporization had been left by De Luc and Saussure. 

 He first showed that a given space, whether void or filled with any 

 gas, in contact with water, contains precisely the same amount of 

 aqueous vapour, and thus established the non-existence of chemical 

 affinity between the gas and the steam of water. It is impossible not 

 to be impressed with the beautiful simplicity of the instruments by 

 which these important results were wrought out. Four barometric 

 tubes, filled with mercury, over which were admitted small columns 

 of water, alcohol, ether and sulphuret of carbon, were the means 

 employed for the admeasurement of the comparative forms of the 

 vapours at different atmospheric or artificial temperatures. Among 

 these successive memoirs is one of great merit on the heat evolved 

 during the entrance of air into a vacuum. He showed the inade- 

 quacy of the thermonaeter to serve as a measure of this evanescent 



