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Updated: June 1, 2025
Having got about three or four times as much as the bulk of my materials, I admitted water to it, and found that it was not imbibed by it. But what surprised me more than I can well express was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame.... I was utterly at a loss how to account for it." XVI., which is reduced from an illustration in Priestley's book on Airs.
The main incidents of Priestley's life are so well known that I need dwell upon them at no great length.
It is strange that Walpole should be so utterly ignorant of Johnson's courage and bodily strength. He says: Priestley's Works, iii. 508. Johnson left a company on my being introduced to it': 'In fact we never were at Oxford at the same time, and the only interview I ever had with him was at Mr. Paradise's, where we dined together at his own request.
He dealt at length with the effects of climate and local circumstances, but unlike the French philosophers did not ignore heredity. While he did not enter upon any discussion of future developments, he threw out incidentally the idea that the world may be united in a league of nations. Dunbar's was an optimistic book, but his optimism was more cautious than Priestley's.
If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps. Such men are not those whom their own generation delights to honour; such men, in fact, rarely trouble themselves about honour, but ask, in another spirit than Falstaff's, "What is honour? Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday."
Very reputable men thought they did God service in inflaming the minds of the rabble against this liberal-minded gentleman. Priestley's account of the riot in the Memoir is singularly temperate. It might even be called tame.
As this new air thus appeared to be completely free from phlogiston, Priestley called it "dephlogisticated air." What was the nature of this air? Priestley's view, in fact, is that atmospheric air is a kind of saltpetre, in which the potash is replaced by some unknown earth.
It is a plain unvarnished tale and entirely innocent of those arts by the practice of which authors please their public. There is no eloquence, no rhetoric, no fine writing of any sort. The two or three really dramatic events in Priestley's career are not handled with a view to producing dramatic effect. There are places where the author might easily have become impassioned.
A century later the use of oxygen had become a matter of routine practice with many physicians. Even in Priestley's own time such men as Dr. John Hunter expressed their belief in its efficacy in certain conditions, as we shall see, but its value in medicine was not fully appreciated until several generations later.
Eleven years later, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile in Paris, a fanatical mob, knowing Priestley's sympathies with the French revolutionists, attacked his house and chapel, burning both and destroying a great number of valuable papers and scientific instruments.
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