762 
PROFESSOR MORTON’S 
We will first advert to the arts, and take cognizance of the 
working of metals, on which so many of the other arts depend. 
The improvements introduced here since chemical laws have been 
studied, are scarcely credible ; while the profits have been dou- 
bled, from the economizing of fuel, and the employment of what 
was formerly considered to be mere refuse. In like manner the 
of arts dyeing, tanning, making of porcelain and pottery, have 
been much benefitted by the application of the principles of che- 
mistry. 
Jt is also incontestible that agriculture has received incal- 
culable good from its application, arising from the labours of Sir 
H. Davy and others in this division of science. Especially 
would 1 direct your attention to the admirable work of Seeley on 
this division of our subject. 
The master mind of our countryman, Sir H. Davy, also pro- 
duced the safety lamp ; an instrument with which the miner fear- 
lessly walks the galleries of the mine filled with the destroying fire 
damp, and, plunging it into the inflammable compound, renders 
it even subservient to his use, while he himself is unharmed. 
By chemistry, also, another equally destructive compound, the 
choke damp (so called by the miner), may be rendered per- 
fectly innocuous. This is found to be carbonic acid gas, and its 
removal is effected by means of moistened quick-lime, which 
readily absorbs it. 
It has been by the application of chemical science that our 
streets and houses are now illuminated by a gaseous fluid, which, 
had it been proposed but a century ago, would have been 
laughed at as chimerical, and the man who broached it treated 
as an enthusiast, or considered an idiot or a madman. Yet this 
gaseous compound, similar to that which the miner dreads, and 
which has been the cause of death to thousands, we have now 
traversing our streets, and finding its way even into palaces, 
where it is made to undergo combustion, and rival in brilliancy 
the twinkling stars in heaven’s high canopy. 
But even the common necessaries of life cannot be obtained 
without the aid of chemistry, while almost all our luxuries are 
dependent on it. Thus the operations of cooking, brewing, making 
of wines and bread, and the distillation of spirit, are so many 
chemical operations. Even the every-day act of obtaining a 
light by prometheans or lucifers is a chemical operation. 
It is likewise shewn in the abstraction of nutriment from bones, 
sugar from rags, and bread from sawdust; so that the probabili- 
ties of a famine are by the aids of science reduced to zero. 
Even the peat from the bogs of Ireland has lately been con- 
verted into a material for the making of paper ; and from the 
