great nation to be governed in rewarding or encouraging genius by the narrow principle of a strict barter of advantages. With respect to great poets and great historians, no such parsimony has ever been exercised. They have been rewarded, and justly, for the contributions they have cast into the treasury of our purely intellectual wealth. And do not justice and policy equally demand that a philosopher of the very highest rank, one who has limited his worldly views to little more than the supply of his natural wants, and has devoted for more than forty years the energies of his powerful mind to enlarging the dominions of science, should be cherished and honoured by that country which receives by reflection the lustre of his well-earned fame ? The most rigid advocate of retrenchment and economy cannot surely object to the moderate provision, which shall exempt such a man in his old age from the irksome drudgery of elementary teaching, and shall give him leisure to devote his yet vigorous faculties to reviewing, correcting, applying, and extending what he has already in great part accomplished. In one instance of recent date, a philosopher who has eminently distinguished himself in purely abstract science, has received the merited reward of a pension for life. It is most desirable then that the British government, by extending its justice to another not less illustrious, should be spared the deep reproach which otherwise assuredly awaits it, of having treated with coldness and neglect one who has contributed so much to raise his country high among intellectual nations, and to exalt the philosophical glory of the age."

The application met with success, and at the meeting of the British Association in Cambridge, it was announced by Professor Sedgwick, that the king had granted a pension of £150 to Dalton. This announcement, in the beautiful language of that eloquent man of science, has been frequently quoted, and is well known.

In 1836 the pension was increased to £300, but two years previously his brother Jonathan died, leaving for him as heir the paternal estate, which now made him comparatively wealthy. He, however, according to his strength, still continued working. So late as 1840 he published four essays, with the title "On the Phosphates and Arseniates; Microcosmic Salt; Acids, Bases, and Water; and a New and Easy Method of Analysing Sugar."

Here we have another instance of his old method of striking roughly in a new direction, and deciding at once on the whole district, little caring who was to come after to examine. He says, p. 10, "The new method of ascertaining the quantity of water in the salts is now to be discussed. I have a bottle with a stopper which just contains 572 grains of pure water, when the stopper is put on and wiped clean and dry, at the temperature of 60° Fahr. A graduated tube or jar is necessary, of 5in. or 6in. long and one quarter of an inch in diameter, to measure exactly to a grain of water. A platina wire is appended to the neck of the bottle, so as to be weighed more conveniently. An ounce, more or less, is to be weighed of any salt; it is then to be put into the bottle, capable of containing 572 grains of pure water (the water having been carefully tansferred into another glass vessel of more ample dimensions), and the salt dissolved and carefully transferred and weighed in the 572 bottle again, and the spare liquor, if is to be put into the narrow graduated tube.

any,

"We have then 572 of pure water, + the pure water of the salt the solid (or liquid water of the salt whatever it may be), all together in a liquid form, in the bottle and the narrow tube. I was greatly surprised at the results. If the salt was anhydrous, it would all go into the bottle exactly filling it to a grain; showing that the salt enters the

pores of

the water. "If the salt contained water, the quantity of water was

measured by the narrow tube in all cases whatever, showing that the solid matter had in reality entered the pores of the water."

This principle he applied to the analysis of sugar, showing that its bulk in solution was equal to the amount of oxygen and hydrogen combined as water, the carbon not occupying any room. This rule Dalton considered as absolutely and universally true. He called it "the greatest discovery next to the atomic theory." This idea in the hands of Messrs. Playfair and Joule has had a fertile expansion, although Dalton's mode of expressing the law has been limited to certain classes of salts.* Had time and strength been given him, he would no doubt, after this commencement, have laboured well in the field of "atomic volume."

It is well when men become aware of the failure of their powers, and are willing to give up their places to those whose minds are in full vigor. The essay on the phosphates and arseniates affords, on page 12, a melancholy instance of the fate of those who overrate their strength. This sentence occurs in the form of an epitaph.-" I sent the account of the phosphates and arseniates to the Royal Society, for their insertion in the transactions. They were rejected. Cavendish, Davy, Wollaston, and Gilbert are no more." It sounds like an epitaph on himself, and the volume tells still more plainly that he had not followed the increased exactness required in science. Nevertheless, in one respect, the last pamphlet is a model of himself, the rapid, hasty work, the carelessness of the labours of others, and the new field struck out in his remarks on sugar. In one point, however, it fails; in his early life he did not work otherwise than on the most advanced ideas; amongst the phosphates and arseniates he had receded.

The position which Dalton had attained seemed to demand

*See "Memoirs of the Chemical Society." Vol. II., &c.

some public demonstration of honor in the town he had so long adorned, and his declining years suggested a permanent memorial. In 1834 his friends decided on having a marble statue, which should present a correct likeness, and for this purpose Chantrey was selected as the most suitable sculptor. Chantrey seems to have entered on the task with pleasure, and he has done it well. This statue is in the entrance hall of the Royal Institution, in Manchester; the trustees having charge of it on condition that no one shall be refused permission to look at it. Dr. Henry says the likeness is more ideal than the reality, a refinement being given to the countenance which did not exist in the bust which Chantrey first took and used as a model when engaged on the full figure. Dr. Henry's intimate knowledge of Dalton must prevent any one from entertaining a very different opinion, but a daguerreotype profile now before me taken from life,* shews not only the marked features of the thinker, which no one has denied as they were striking, but that peculiar refinement which gives the idea of the student and the gentleman. This small photograph on a silver plate, is exactly similar to the head so beautifully engraved by Stephenson, I suppose indeed that it served as the copy; every expression is the same, and every fold of the abundant white hair, nor can I see that the engraver has increased the refinement, although he has probably somewhat heightened the forehead.

In the same year, I believe, he was presented at court, a place that seemed scarcely to suit such a man, but he seems to have had no desire to evade any of his natural claims to honor, taking them as a necessary consequence of his work, neither too highly elated like the great majority who are honored, nor painfully retiring like Cavendish.

Being a Quaker, and not able to wear a sword, he was taken in the scarlet robes of an Oxford Doctor of Laws, and

*This belongs to Mr. John Parry, who assisted in taking it.

although it was feared that scarlet would scarcely suit one of the Society of Friends, Mr. Babbage, who took him, remarked that as he had a "kind of colour blindness, all red colours appeared to him of the colour of dirt." Mr. Babbage adds, "besides, I found that our friend entertained very reasonable views of such mere matters of form;" a remark perfectly true. Dalton was no bigot or formalist. The ceremony was rehearsed beforehand by his friends, and it passed over well, but not without remark on the length of time that he remained before the king, who detained him long enough to ask him several questions. Some say that Dalton, not imagining that he had to pass on without a word of conversation, had waited to be spoken to, and somewhat embarrassed his Majesty, in his desire to be civil, to find suitable questions to put to him. But Dalton had learnt his part well, and the reason of the honor that he had of staying a few seconds longer than anyone else, until people began to ask who he could be, is more likely to have been caused by the fact which Mr. Babbage mentions, that the king was informed of the unusual presentation by Lord Brougham, who was Lord Chancellor at the time, and nominally presented him.

Honors of various kinds soon became familiar to him, such as fellowships of societies and degrees from universities, of which the title of LL.D., from Edinburgh, was one. They came upon him as on one to whom they were welcome, but remained entirely external to him; his life had been complete without their aid, and it was too late for them to find a perfect sympathy either in his intellect or his habitual feeling.

It is to be regretted that Miss Johns has not preserved more about Dalton, as she had the ability and also his confidence; we might have obtained through her means a better picture of his mental and moral phases. In the year 1830, when the Johns family left the town, Dalton took a house close to their