man.

possible bias of interest. When the fugitives from the St. Domingo massacre arrived in 1793, destitute and miserable, he wrote to Monroe: "Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of I deny the power of the general government to apply money to such a purpose, but I deny it with a bleeding heart. It belongs to the State governments. Pray urge ours to be liberal." In his French package came one day a letter from the wife of a groom in the stables of the Duke of Orleans in Paris, addressed to her sister, a poor woman who lived fifteen miles from Monticello. He was careful to enjoin it upon his daughter, not merely to forward the letter, but to send it to the woman's house by a special messenger.

We observe, too, that he still looked wistfully to the unexplored West. As a member of the Philosophical Society, he took the lead in 1792 in raising a thousand guineas to send Andrew Michaud to grope his way across the continent, and find out all he could of the great plains and rivers, the Indians and the animals, the bones of the mammoth, and whatever else a Philosophical Society and an American people might care to know. Andrew Michaud did not find the Pacific Ocean; and the task remained undone till Jefferson, ten years later, found the predestined man in Meriwether Lewis, a son of one of his Albemarle neighbors.

CHAPTER LII.

ARRIVAL OF DR. PRIESTLEY IN THE UNITED STATES.

TIME brings its revenges. I read, in a recent number of the London Athenæum, a quiet advertisement informing the public that "it is proposed to honor the memory of Dr. Priestley, and to commemorate his discoveries, and his services to the scientific world, by the erection of a statue in Birmingham, where he lived so many years."

The advertisement goes on to say, that, as no other public memorial of Dr. Priestley exists, it is believed that a large number of persons interested in science will be glad to contribute something to perpetuate the memory "of the father of Pneumatic Chemistry, the discoverer of oxygen, and one of the most illustrious men of science whom the last century produced." Then follows a list of sixty-six subscriptions, varying in amount from fifty pounds to ten shillings. Among the names we recognize those of Professor Huxley, Mr. Martineau, Dr. Russell, Sir Rowland Hill, and several other members of the Royal Society.

A statue to Priestley in Birmingham! Does the reader happen to remember how Dr. Priestley left Birmingham eighty years ago? July the 14th, 1791, some of the liberal people of that city proposed to celebrate by a public dinner the anniversary of the destruction of the Bastille, which had taken place two years before. But two years in revolutionary times is equal to a century. When the Bastille was destroyed, in 1789, the event was hailed with joy throughout the world; but, during the two years following, the revolutionists of Paris had committed excesses which had repelled and disheartened all but the stanchest friends of liberty, — all but such as Priestley, who was recognized in Birmingham as a chief and representative of the liberal party. Priestley had published a reply to the Reflections of Edmund Burke. He had been named a citi

zen of the French Republic. He had defended the Revolution in the local press.

The aristocratic faction of Birmingham, whose instinct was then, and is now, to advance their cause by violence, determined to prevent the celebration. It is easy to stir up a riot in times of popular excitement, but it is not so easy to limit or check its ravages. After breaking up the banquet, and destroying the tavern in which it was given, the mob rushed to the house of Priestley, who had not attended the dinner, broke it open, and compelled the family to seek safety in flight. The rioters took out his books in armfuls, those precious books, the solace of his life, which he had been fifty years in gathering, for he was a hoarder of books from his infancy. His library was scattered over the road for half a mile, and his torn manuscripts covered the floors of his house. His apparatus was broken to pieces; and, when the destruction of the interior was complete, the house was set on fire. The fire, however, was extinguished before further harm was done.

This disaster, strange to relate, made the philosopher's fortune; for although the jury, after a trial of nine years, awarded him but twenty-five hundred pounds damages, of his claim of more than four thousand, the liberal portion of the public subscribed handsomely to make good his loss. His own brother-in-law, as Lord Brougham tells us, gave him ten thousand pounds, besides settling upon him an annuity of two hundred pounds for life. As he already had a pension of one hundred and fifty pounds a year from Lord Shelburne, whose librarian he had formerly been, he was now in very liberal circumstances for a philosopher. In Pennsylvania, where he spent the residue of his life, such an income, at that period, was even superabundant.

There is an error in the advertisement quoted above. It is not true, that no "public memorial" of Dr. Priestley has been erected. Every soda-fountain is his monument; and we all know how numerous and how splendid they are. Every fountain, too, whence flows the home-made water of Vichy and Kissingen is a monument to Priestley; for it was he who discovered the essential portions of the process by which all such waters are made. The misfortune is, however, that, of the millions of human beings who quaff the cool and sparkling soda, not one in a thousand would know what name to pronounce, if he were called upon to drink to the memory of the

inventor. And really his invention of soda-water is a reason why Americans should join in the scheme to honor his memory. He not only did all he could to assist the birth of the nation, but he invented the national beverage.

Yet he always protested that he was very little of a chemist; and often said that his making chemical experiments at all was a kind of accident. A Yorkshireman by birth, the son of a cloth-finisher, he was one of those boys who take to learning as a duck takes to the water. He was an eager, precipitate student from his childhood up. Not content with the Latin and Greek of his school, he must needs learn Hebrew in the vacations, and push on into other ancient languages of the East,― Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, — not neglecting such trifles as French, Italian, and German. This way of passing youth never fails to do lasting injury. He had an aversion to the glorious sports of the play-ground, and to all the lighter literature. Need I say, then, that, before he was eighteen years of age, his health had completely broken down, and he was obliged to lay aside his books for months.

Beginning life as a Calvinist minister, he gradually adopted a milder theology, became, in fact, a Unitarian, and abandoned the pulpit for a time. Then he set up a school. He spent many years in teaching and writing school-books; his first publication being an English grammar for children. At one school, where he taught for a while, a course of lectures was given upon chemistry, a science of which he knew nothing, not even its object or nature. Attending these lectures, his curiosity was awakened, and he began to experi

ment.

It was Dr. Franklin's influence, however, that weaned him from other subjects, and caused him to devote his main strength to science. In 1761, when Dr. Franklin was in London, Priestley, who was in the habit of visiting the city once a year, sought the acquaintance of Franklin, and became intimate with him. Franklin related to him the history of those delightful six winters, during which he and his Philadelphia friends were experimenting in electricity. The young schoolmaster, who had already some success in book-making, now offered to write a history of electricity, if Franklin would put him in the way of getting the material. Twelve months after, Franklin had the pleasure of receiving from his industrious friend a copy of the work, one of those square, massive quartos, in which the

science of that age was usually given to the world. In this work was printed, for the first time, the narrative of Franklin's immortal experiment with the kite, which Priestley received from the experimenter's own lips. It is a curious fact in the history of science, that Dr. Franklin himself never took the trouble to write out an account of this experiment, the most daring, ingenious, and celebrated which science records. The work was remarkably successful, passing through three editions in nine years. From this time onward, Priestley was almost wholly a man of science, and no year passed without his adding something to human knowledge. He very greatly increased our knowledge of the air we breathe, and its constituent gases.

He would have been even more successful, if he had been earlier favored by fortune. Being compelled, through his poverty, to spend a large portion of his time and strength in earning his livelihood, he could not follow out his discoveries, nor pursue them with that watchful calm so necessary for avoiding error and perfecting truth. His zeal, however, made up in some degree for his lack of means; and the list of his discoveries will always invest his name with distinction.

During the whole period of Franklin's residence in England, Priestley aided him by his pen and influence in opening the eyes of the public to the folly of the ministry in estranging the American colonies. The last day of Franklin's stay in London, Priestley spent with him from morning to night, without interruption, looking over American newspapers just arrived. Franklin was completely overcome with the prospect of a civil war, and the dismemberment of the empire.

over

"A great part of the day," says Dr. Priestley, "he was looking a number of American newspapers, directing me what to extract from them for the English ones; and in reading them he was frequently not able to proceed for the tears literally running down his cheeks."

The two friends never met again; for it was not until 1794, when Franklin had been dead four years, that the English philosopher landed in New York. He had a distinguished public reception in the city; and, proceeding to Philadelphia, he was invited to become Professor of Chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania. He declined, on the ground that he did not know enough of the subject.