450 
DR. PliOUT ON CHEMISTRY. 
which I have long considered as regulating the union of bodies 
in nature. 
This is not the place nor the occasion, however, to enter on 
the subject of chemical philosophy, even if I were prepared to do 
it in detail, which I am not; but in order that what follows may 
be the better understood, it may not be amiss to state very 
briefly some of the views to which I was led now many years 
ago, and which are quite at variance with the artificial system at 
present received, and seem to indicate rather the existence of a 
more natural system. 
1. In the first place, bodies appear to be associated together 
in natural groups or families, having certain radical laws in com¬ 
mon. Thus the three great natural classes or groups, which ap¬ 
pear to essentially constitute the groundwork of all organized be¬ 
ings, may be denominated the saccharine , the oleaginous , and the 
albuminous . An account of the analyses of the principal objects 
of the first of these great classes, the saccharine , has been already 
published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1827; the other 
two have not yet been published. The radical law pervading the 
whole class of saccharine bodies is, that they are essentially com¬ 
posed of carbon and water in different proportions. The radical 
law pervading the oily bodies, as far as I have yet examined 
them, is, that they are essentially composed of olefiant gas and 
water, or have relation to this composition. The radical law of 
the albuminous class I cannot yet venture to mention. When 
the analyses of all these three great classes are completed and 
published, it is my intention to point out in detail the curious 
and important results to which they lead; but not till then. In 
the meantime it is my wish that the results which have already 
been, and which remain to be published, shall be thoroughly in¬ 
vestigated by others, in order that their errors, if they contain 
any, may be pointed out, that I may not have the mortification 
of building my superstructure upon a sandy foundation. 
2. The numbers conventionally employed by chemists, and 
termed atomic weights or chemical equivalents, I am disposed to 
view in a very different light from that in which they are usually 
viewed at present. Supposing them to be correct, they no doubt 
represent, in general, the quantities in which bodies most usually 
combine , but by no means always. Indeed, they appear to me 
to be often nothing more than one term of a natural series pecu¬ 
liar to each body, and determining its combination. Thus 9, the 
number assumed to represent the combining weight of water, is to 
be considered only as one term of the series 3:6:9:12:15: See. 
in all which proportions (and, perhaps, in still lower submuiti- 
