up the fight. From America he sent out his last defy to the
enemy, in 1800, in a brochure entitled "The Doctrine of
Phlogiston Upheld," etc. In the mind of its author it was little
less than a paean of victory; but all the world beside knew that
it was the swan-song of the doctrine of phlogiston. Despite the
defiance of this single warrior the battle was really lost and
won, and as the century closed "antiphlogistic" chemistry had
practical possession of the field.



III. CHEMISTRY SINCE THE TIME OF DALTON

JOHN DALTON AND THE ATOMIC THEORY

Small beginnings as have great endings--sometimes. As a case in
point, note what came of the small, original effort of a
self-trained back-country Quaker youth named John Dalton, who
along towards the close of the eighteenth century became
interested in the weather, and was led to construct and use a
crude water-gauge to test the amount of the rainfall. The simple
experiments thus inaugurated led to no fewer than two hundred
thousand recorded observations regarding the weather, which
formed the basis for some of the most epochal discoveries in
meteorology, as we have seen. But this was only a beginning. The
simple rain-gauge pointed the way to the most important
generalization of the nineteenth century in a field of science
with which, to the casual observer, it might seem to have no
alliance whatever. The wonderful theory of atoms, on which the
whole gigantic structure of modern chemistry is founded, was the