the view of things referred to : ^' La chimie d^aujourdhui est 

 la chimie des choses qui n'existent pas." We can no longer 

 doubt the real existence of ethyl, and methyl, for instance 

 (Note B) ; nor can we doubt that both are products of the 

 same infinite Wisdom, though one of these be through its 

 abuse, relegated by certain persons to the kingdom of darkness. 

 Unlike phlogiston, these conipound elements may be. said to be 

 fairly demonstrated as existing in reality, and not merely in 

 the imagination of the theorists. 



10. When such a theory is found useful in a thousand ways, 

 when missing links are established through its agency, and its 

 lights are confirmed by the test of experience, it seems suffi- 

 ciently established to take its place among the most important 

 discoveries of mankind. What, indeed, can be a greater triumph 

 for the Baconian school of philosopky"^ than to show that the 

 labours of a few microscopic chemists, of men whose ideas 

 might be supposed to be in a manner limited to the compara- 

 tively narrow field which their researches embraced, have done 

 more towards the elucidation of one of the most abstruse 

 questions on which the human mind can be engaged than was 

 effected by the profoundest intellects of the ages that preceded, 

 furnished with all the learning of the times in which they 

 flourished, and inured to habits of abstract and subtle disquisi- 

 tion? (NoteC.) 



11. Although not insensible to the difficulties involved, I still 

 accept as true and proven, science the Atomic Theory, believing 

 with Professor Canizzaro that " the existing theory of mole- 

 cules and ato-ms is but the crowning of the edifice whose 

 foundations were laid by the chemist of Manchester." I notice 

 with much pleasure that this learned Professor pressed upon the 

 Chemical Society the importance of the recognition of this view 

 of the subject. In the Faraday lecture, delivered before the 

 Society on May 30, 1872, whilst adverting to the complete 

 transformation through which our science is passing," he recalls 

 the minds of his audience to the era of which we have been 

 thinking. " Go back," he says, to the times of Dalton, and 

 read, in the history of chemistry by Thomas Thomson, the con- 

 fession by that chemist of the effect produced on his own mind 

 by the explanation of the Atomic Theory which Dalton gave 

 him in the course of a short conversation. ' I was enchanted,^ he 

 says, ^ with the new light which immediately burst upon my 

 mind, and I saw at a glance the immense importance of such a 

 theory.^ " 



Professor PaubenVj iidrodi'ct'ion to the Atomic Theory, p. 3. 



