body burns ill or with difficulty."[10]


It needed the genius of such a man as Lavoisier to complete the
refutation of the false but firmly grounded phlogiston theory,
and against such a book as his Elements of Chemistry the feeble
weapons of the supporters of the phlogiston theory were hurled in
vain.

But while chemists, as a class, had become converts to the new
chemistry before the end of the century, one man, Dr. Priestley,
whose work had done so much to found it, remained unconverted.
In this, as in all his life-work, he showed himself to be a most
remarkable man. Davy said of him, a generation later, that no
other person ever discovered so many new and curious substances
as he; yet to the last he was only an amateur in science, his
profession, as we know, being the ministry. There is hardly
another case in history of a man not a specialist in science
accomplishing so much in original research as did this chemist,
physiologist, electrician; the mathematician, logician, and
moralist; the theologian, mental philosopher, and political
economist. He took all knowledge for his field; but how he found
time for his numberless researches and multifarious writings,
along with his every-day duties, must ever remain a mystery to
ordinary mortals.

That this marvellously receptive, flexible mind should have
refused acceptance to the clearly logical doctrines of the new
chemistry seems equally inexplicable. But so it was. To the
very last, after all his friends had capitulated, Priestley kept