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to degenerate into mere extractive matter. Every worker and thinker is allowed to speak for himself, and there are few allusions made to the opinions of any, however eminent, who has not himself laboured on the subject. In the court of science every man is his own best witness; by using description instead of quotation we employ advocates who bandy about the meaning, until at last it can nowhere be found. We cannot be too careful of the fame of the absent, were it merely to protest against the loud assertion of self, which is so easy for those who are present, even when their only hope of fame lies in that two-edged truth, that "a living dog is better than a dead lion."

ERRATA.

Near bottom of page 77, the inverted commas should begin, "For one is not the same."

Page 79, for air and matter, read air and water.

Page 251, for John Gough W., read Henry Hough W.

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MEMOIRS

OF

The Literary and Philosophical Society of

Manchester.

MEMOIR OF DR. DALTON,

AND

HISTORY OF THE ATOMIC THEORY.

[Read October 2nd, 1855.]

CHAPTER I.

IN 1789, when this Society was first established, chemistry could not with propriety be called a science, although Lavoisier was attempting to decide on some of its more prominent laws, and although Cavendish, Black, and Watt had raised it from that position of obscurity to which the meagreness of its results had so long condemned it, and shewn to the world that it possessed a power, apparently the highest in order. With the exception of these and a very few others, the whole body of its students were under the subjection of one of the strangest delusions that has ever usurped the place of a law of nature. A body of men for many ages at work had made so little progress towards eliciting definite forms of thought upon the elements with which they worked, that the theory of Phlogiston was regarded as a great discovery; a fanciful theory founded on an explanation

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