pital; but having heen successfully opposed by Dr Pemberton, he expressed his determination never again to write a prescription, and henceforth devoted his time almost entirely to experimental chemistry. He was elected a fellow of the Royal society in 1793; and was elected Second Secretary, November 30, 1806. His communications to the Philosophical Transactions' commenced in 1797, and amount to the following numerous list : 6 · · In 1797, On the Gout and Urinary Concretions;' in 1800, On Double Images caused by Atmospherical Refractions; in 1801, Experiments on the Chemical Production and Agency of Electricity;' in 1802, A Method of examining Refractive and Dispersive Powers by Prismatic Reflection; and a paper On the Oblique Refraction of Iceland crystal; in 1803, the Bakerian Lecture, consisting of Observations on the quantity of Horizontal Refraction; with a method of measuring the Dip at Sea;' in 1804, a paper On a new Metal found in crude plate;' in 1805, another On the discovery of Palladium, with observations on other substances found with Platina;' in 1806, the Bakerian Lecture, On the force of Percussion;' in 1807, an Essay on Fairy-rings;' in 1808, three On Platina and Native Palladium from Brazil;' On the identity of Columbium and Tantalum ;' and a 'Description of a Reflective Goniometer;' in 1810, the Croonian Lecture, On Muscular Action, Sea-sickness, and the salutary effects of exercise on gestation;' and an essay On Cystic Oxide, a new species of Urinary Calculus;' in 1811, 'On the non-existence of sugar in the blood of persons labouring under Diabetes Mellitus;' in 1812, two papers On the primitive crystals of Carbonate of Lime, Bitter Spar, and Iron Spar;' and 'On a Periscopic Camera Obscura and Microscope in 1813, the Bakerian Lecture, On the elementary particles of certain Crystals; the explanation of A Method of drawing extremely fine Wires; and A Description of a Single-lens Microscope;' in 1820, articles' On the methods of cutting rock crystal for Micrometers;' and 'On sounds inaudible by certain ears.'-Dr Wollaston communicated, in 1815, to Thomson's 'Annals of Philosophy,' A Description of an Elementary Galvanic Battery; and to the Philosophical Magazine, in 1816, Observations and Experiments on the Mass of Native Iron found in Brazil.' Within the session only, in the midst of which his decease occurred, five essays by Dr Wollaston were read before the Royal society. The first was the Bakerian Lecture, On a method of rendering Platina malleable; for which, on their last anniversary, November 30, 1828, the Royal society awarded to the inventor one of the royal medals; and an honourable eulogy was delivered by the President on the occasion. The subjects of the other four essays were, On a microscopic double; On a differential Barometer; On a method of comparing the Light of the Sun with that of the Fixed Stars; and, On the Water of the Mediterranean. Thomson, in his History of the Royal society,' when speaking of modern British Chemistry, says that "three distinct schools have been established by three gentlemen,"-Dr Wollaston, Mr (the late Sir Humphrey) Davy, and Mr Dalton. "Dr Wollaston," he adds, "possesses an uncommon neatness of hand, and has invented a very ingenious method of determining the properties and constituents of very minute quantities of matter. This is attended with several great advantages; it requires but very little apparatus, and therefore the experiments may be performed in almost any situation; it saves a great deal of time and a great deal of expense; while the numerous discoveries of Dr Wollaston demonstrate the precision of which his method is susceptible." It may be added, that the laboratory of Dr Wollaston, small as it was, proved more profitable to his purse than has usually been the case with experimental philosophers. His discovery of the malleability of platinum, it has been asserted, alone produced about £30,000. Among the delicate instruments, which he was accustomed to make in a remarkably neat manner, was a sliding rule of chemical equivalents, which is exceedingly useful to the practical chemist. He also constructed a galvanic battery of such small dimensions, that it was contained in a thimble. By inserting platina wire in silver, and when at a great heat drawing out both together, and afterwards separating them by dissolving away the silver with nitrous acid, he produced some wire of platina, of so diminutive a diameter as to be very much finer than any hair, and almost imperceptible to the naked eye. Of the Geological society Dr Wollaston became a member in 1812: he was frequently elected on the council, and was for some time one of the Vice-presidents. He made no contributions to the publications of that learned body; but he was well acquainted with the scope of their inquiries, and always attended to the geological phenomena of the countries which he visited in his excursions. At the annual meeting of the Society, February 20, 1829, Dr Fitton, the president, remarked, that "though Dr Wollaston did not publish any thing on the more immediate subjects of our pursuit, his success in the cultivation of other branches of knowledge has conduced in no small degree to the recent advancement of geology. The discovery of two new metals was but a part of his contributions to chemical science: and his application of chemistry to the examination of very minute quantities, by means of the simplest apparatus, divested chemical inquiry of much of its practical difficulty, and greatly promoted mineralogy. His Camera Lucida is an acquisition of peculiar value to the geologist, as it enables those who are unskilled in drawing to preserve the remembrance of what they see, and gives a fidelity to sketches hardly attainable by other means. The adaptation of measurement by reflection to the purposes of crystallography, by the invention of his goniometer, introduced into that department of science a certainty and precision, which the most skilful observers were before unable to attain; and his paper on the distinctions of the carbonates of lime, magnesia, and iron, affords one of the most remarkable instances that can be mentioned, of the advantage arising from the union of crystallography with chemical research. He was in fact a mineralogist of the first order,—if the power of investigating accurately the characters and compositions of minerals be considered as the standard of skill. Possessing such variety of knowledge, with the most inventive quickness and sagacity in its application to new purposes, Dr Wollaston was at all times accessible to those whom he believed to be sincerely occupied in useful inquiry: he seemed indeed himself to delight in such communications; and his singular dexterity and neatness in experiment rendered comparatively easy to him the multiplied investigations arising from them, which to others might have been oppressive or impracticable. His penetration and correct judgment, upon subjects apparently the most remote from his own immediate pursuits, made him, during many of the latter years of his life, the universal arbiter on questions of scientific difficulty; and the instruction thus derived from communication with a man of his attainments, has had an effect on the progress of knowledge in this country, and on the conduct of various public undertakings, the value of which it would be difficult to estimate, and the loss of which is at present, and long will be, quite impossible to supply. These, gentlemen, are some of the grounds on which the memory of Dr Wollaston claims our gratitude and veneration, as cultivators of natural science; but to those who have known him in private life he has left, what is still more precious, the example of his personal character. It would be difficult to name a man who so well combined the qualities of an English gentleman and a philosopher; or whose life better deserves the eulogium given by the first of our orators to one of our most distinguished public characters; for it was marked by a constant wish and endeavour to be useful to mankind.'' Dr Henry, in the last edition of his Elements of Experimental Chemistry,' draws the following parallel betwixt Davy and Wollaston: "It is impossible to direct our views to the future improvement of this wide field of science, without deeply lamenting the privation which we have lately sustained of two of its most successful cultivators-Sir Humphrey Davy and Dr Wollaston;-at a period of life, too, when it seemed reasonable to have expected from each of them a much longer continuance of his invaluable labours. To those high gifts of nature which are the characteristic of genius, and which constitute its very essence, both those eminent men united an unwearied industry, and zeal in research, and habits of accurate reasoning, without which even the energies of genius are inadequate to the achievement of great scientific designs. With these excellencies, common to both, they were nevertheless distinguishable by marked intellectual peculiarities. Bold, ardent, and enthusiastic, Davy soared to greater heights; he commanded a wider horizon; and his keen vision penetrated to its utmost boundaries. His imagination, in the highest degree fertile and inventive, took a rapid and extensive range in pursuit of conjectural analogies, which he submitted to close and patient comparison with known facts, and tried by an appeal to ingenious and conclusive experiments. He was imbued with the spirit, and he was a master in the practice, of the inductive logic; and he has left us some of the noblest examples of the efficacy of that great instrument of human reason in the discovery of truth. He applied it, not only to connect classes of facts of more limited extent and importance, but to develop great and comprehensive laws, which embrace phenomena that are almost universal to the natural world. In explaining those laws, he cast upon them the illumination of his own clear and vivid conceptions;-he felt an intense admiration of the beauty, order, and harmony, which are conspicuous in the perfect chemistry of nature; and he expressed those feelings with a force of eloquence which could issue only from a mind of the highest powers, and of the finest sensibilities. With much less enthusiasm from temperament, Dr Wollaston was endowed with bodily senses of extraordinary acuteness and accuracy, and with great general vigour of understanding. Trained in the discipline of the exact sciences, he had acquired a powerful command over his attention, and had habituated himself to the most rigid correctness, both of thought and of language. He was sufficiently provided with the resources of the mathematics, to be enabled to pursue with success profound inquiries in mechanical and optical philosophy, the results of which enabled him to unfold the causes of phenomena not before understood, and to enrich the arts, connected with those sciences, by the invention of ingenious and valuable instruments. In chemistry he was distinguished by the extreme nicety and delicacy of his observations; by the quickness and precision with which he marked resemblances and discriminated differences; the sagacity with which he devised experiments, and anticipated their results; and the skill with which he executed the analysis of fragments of new substances, often so minute as to be scarcely perceptible by ordinary eyes. He was remarkable, too, for the caution with which he advanced from facts to general conclusions; a caution which, if it sometimes prevented him from reaching at once to the most sublime truths, yet rendered every step of his ascent a secure station, from which it was easy to rise to higher and more enlarged inductions. Thus these illustrious men, though differing essentially in their natural powers and acquired habits, and moving independently of each other, in different paths, contributed to accomplish the same great ends-the evolving new elements; the combining matter into new forms; the increase of human happiness by the improvement of the arts of civilized life; and the establishment of general laws, that will serve to guide other philosophers onwards through vast and unexplored regions of scientific discovery." A short time before his death, Dr Wollaston presented to the Royal society funded stock to the amount of £1000, the interest of which is to be annually employed towards the encouragement of experiments. His remains were interred at Chisselhurst, in Kent. The funeral was, according to his particular request, exceedingly private, as he had desired that it should be attended only by the descendants of his grandfather. Dr Wollaston was never married. 1 Thomas Young. BORN A. D. 1774-DIED A. D. 1829. THIS distinguished philosopher and most accomplished scholar, was educated partly at Gottingen and partly at Edinburgh. He graduated at the latter university, and soon after came to London, where he was appointed one of the lecturers at the Royal institution, and subsequently physician to St George's hospital. In 1794 he was elected a fellow of the Royal society, and in 1804 he was appointed Foreign secretary to that distinguished body, having already acquired equal reputation in science and letters. Dr Young's fame will chiefly rest upon his discovery of the phonetic system of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The following list, however, of his publications previously to 1815, when his remarks on the Inscription of Rosetta were first given to the public, will best illustrate the extraordinary fertility and activity of his mind. It is taken from an autograplı manuscript of the author: 1 New Monthly and Gentleman's Magazines.-Annual Obituary, vol. xiv. 1. A short Note on Gum Ladanum, with a verbal Criticism on Longinus, signed with his initials, and inserted in the Monthly Revi w for 1791, seems to have been his first appearance before the public. The criticism was admitted by Dr Burney to be correct.-2. In the Gentleman's Magazine for April, 1792, Observations on the Manufacture of Iron; an Attempt to remove some Objections to Dr Crawford's theory of Heat, which had been advanced by Dr Beddoes.-3. Entomological Remarks; Gentleman's Magazine, December, 1792: on the Habits of Spiders; on a Passage of Aristotle, with an Illustration of the Fabrician System; and a plate of the mouth of an insect.—4. Observations on Vision: Philosophical Transactions, 1793, p. 169; explaining the accommodation of the eye, from a muscular power in the crystalline lens-a theory not altogether new, but immediately afterwards claimed by John Hunter, as a discovery of his own.-5. Contributions to Hodgkin's Calligraphia Græca, 4to. London, 1794; including Lear's Curses in Iambics.-6. Description of an Opercularia. Linnæan Transactions, vol. iii. p. 30. London, 1797; read in 1794. The Opercularia Aspera of Gærtner, called by Persoon, Cryptospermum Youngii, from the name here suggested.-7. Some Notes and an Epigram, in Dalzel's Collectanea Græca, 8vo. Edinburgh, 1795.— 8. De Corporis Humani Viribus conservatricibus, Dissertatio, 8vo. Gottingen, 1796: an Inaugural Dissertation, collected from a multiplicity of authors.-9. Translation of Lichtenstein on the Genus Mantis. Linnæan Transactions, vol. vi. p. 1.; read in 1797.-10. The Leptologist. British Magazine, 1800: a series of Essays on Grammar, Criticism, Geometry, Paintings, Manners, Riches, Exercises, Medicine, and Music; some of them reprinted afterwards.-11, 12. There is also an account of the French Calendar and Measures, and an Essay on the Morals of the Germans.-13. Experiments and Enquiries respecting Sound and Light. Philosophical Transactions, 1800, p. 106: the vibrations of the air observed by means of smoke; those of strings counted, and their orbits observed with a microscope; their harmonics suppressed at pleasure.-14. A Bakerian Lecture on the Mechanism of the Eye. Philosophical Transactions, 1801, p. 23: describing a new Optometer, and showing that the eye retains its power of accommodation under water; measuring also the dispersive power of the eye. (Dr Young remarks, that he "afterwards found that his own eye lost almost the whole of its power of accommodation soon after fifty, remaining fixed at its greatest focal distance.")-15. A Letter respecting Sound and Light. Nicholson's Journal, August, 1801; in Answer to Professor Robison, of Edinburgh.-16. A Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy, 8vo. London, 1802: presenting a Mathematical Demonstration of the most important Theorems in Mechanics and in Optics; and containing the first publi,cation of the general law of the Interference of Light, which has been considered as the happiest result of all the author's efforts. It was not till the year 1827, that the importance of this law could be said to be fully admitted in England: it was in that year that the council of the Royal society adjudged Count Rumford's Medal to M. Fresnal, for having applied it, with some modifications, to the most intricate phenomena of polarised light.-17. A Bakerian Lecture on the Theory of Light and Colours; Phil. Trans. 1802, p. 12; developing the law 4 M * V. |