SCIIEELE AND IIIS DISCOVERIES. 
217 
In the name of the Government he offered him a Chair in the Faculty, and the 
direction of different manufactories. Scheele absolutely refused ; but learning 
that there was a vacant pharmacy in a small and obscure country town, he set 
off for Koeping, on the Lake Malaren. He was then thirty-one years old, and 
while occupied in the routine duties of that seemingly unenviable position, he 
pondered over, and in his leisure moments successfully worked out, that series of 
discoveries that will for ever be associated with his name. Two years from this 
date, (1777) the Royal College of Medicine received him gratuitously, and dis¬ 
pensed with all the usual formalities of introduction. Nine years he patiently 
worked on at Koeping. He found the business in a languishing condition, and 
he succeeded in its restoration ; paid the debts of his defunct predecessor, as well 
as created a small fortune for the widow, whom, in his less abstract moments, 
he meant to marry. Bergmann was his unfailing herald in the world of Science. 
At his suggestion the Academies of Berlin, Erfurt, and Sardinia, and the Royal 
Society of Medicine at Paris admitted him amongst their ranks. Just when 
the present seemed to give promise of the brightest future, he was suddenly en¬ 
feebled in his health. He had wished as a last point of honour to have left his 
name and moderate savings to the widow, but the very day appointed for his 
marriage he was seized with fever, which proving fatal, he died at the early 
age of forty-three. 
The first essay of Scheele was on Tartaric Acid. It was addressed to Berg¬ 
mann, who returned it to the author without the slightest comment. Hurt by 
this strange indifference, Scheele sent his manuscript to Retzius, Professor at 
Lund, who inserted it in the Transactions of Stockholm for 1770, but with no ac¬ 
knowledgment of the author. In 1771 he published his 4 Examination of Fluor 
Spar and its Acid.’ Some years previous, Margraff was engaged on the same 
subject, and pointed out that Fluor Spar did not contain Sulphuric Acid. 
Scheele, on treating it with this powerful reagent, noticed certain white acid va¬ 
pours which attacked the glass. He named this product Fluo-silicic Acid. Re¬ 
marking that the vessel filled with water in which it was collected w r as covered 
with a coating of Silica, he at first thought that Silica was composed of Water 
and Fluoric Acid ; but in a second notice (1780) he recognized his mistake, and 
demonstrated that the Silica obtained came from the glass of the retort or else 
from the receiver. The ultimate result of this investigation was the admission 
of the radical called Fluor. In 1774 Scheele published his 4 Researches on Black 
Magnesia,’ otherwise called Manganese. He was then living at Upsal, for it 
was at the instigation of Bergmann that he undertook this inquiry—one of his 
best performances. This memoir contains no less than four discoveries which 
would have sufficed to have established the reputation of a skilful chemist. In 
the first place, he discovered that this ore combined eagerly with metallic 
oxides and with some acids, whence he concluded that black Magnesia had a 
metallic base. On treating it successively with all the strong acids, he remarked 
(1) That with Sulphuric Acid he obtained a white pinkish salt (Sulphate of 
Manganese), and that there was liberated an elastic fluid which w r as not fixed 
air, the only gas then known, but which possessed the properties of dephlogisti- 
cated air, being evidently Oxygen. (2) With Muriatic Acid he produced a gas 
of yellow colour, having an odour of Aqua Regia. Having collected this gas 
in a bladder, it was coloured yellow, from which he at first thought that it was 
Aqua Regia in a state of vapour. He then collected it in bottles filled with 
water, with Hales’s apparatus, and he noticed that the gas corroded the corks 
and turned them yellow ; that it bleached blue Litmus Paper as well as vege¬ 
table colours, and that during this action, in presence of water, the gas was 
converted into Muriatic Acid. He also established that plants once thus bleached 
did not recover their natural colours, neither on the addition of Acids nor Al¬ 
kalis ; that this gas attacked all metals. In a word, he gave an exact and 
