circumstances is notorious. Others, like George Green, received no recognition whatsoever. In addition, the English passion for independence played its part. The demand for complete freedom, if it fostered the eccentricity of which the docile, drilled Germans complained, although it led to pig-headedness, as in Dalton's case, also proved greatly favorable to original genius. For, it is well to recall that more original notions, basal to modern science, have come from England than from any other land, even if, as with Newton and Darwin, France was to systematize Newtonianisme, Germany Darwinismus. England possessed no trained regiments to accomplish these things. Accordingly, if we remember all this, some apparent mysteries that cloak Dalton's career and mental characteristics begin to dissipate. In short, the Dalton we commemorate would have been nigh inconceivable had he been "born to the intellectual purple of the ancient universities"; but the Dalton we regret, who remained obdurate to Gay-Lussac despite Berzelius's intercession, might never have been. The qualities of the man, like his defects, pertained to his strong, wayward and undisciplined, if narrow and often uncouth, provincialism. Qui a nuce nucleum esse vult, frangat nucem.
II
Dalton maintained silence from 1793 till 1799, hindered, perhaps, by college duties. On reappearance, he soon dropped the rôle of meteorologist for that of chemist and physicist. The new line was taken in the paper entitled "Experiments and Observations on the Power of Fluids to Conduct Heat, with Reference to Count Rumford's Seventh Essay on the same Subject," read before the Manchester Society on April 12, 1799. The simple nature of his apparatus may be illustrated aptly from this communication.
Took an ale glass of a conical figure, 212 inches in diameter, and 3 inches deep; filled it with water that had been standing in the room, and consequently of the temperature of the air nearly. Put the bulb of a thermometer in the bottom of the glass, the scale being out of the water; then having marked the temperature, I put the red-hot tip of a poker half an inch deep in the water, holding it there steadily for half a minute; and as soon as it was withdrawn, I dipped the bulb of a sensitive thermometer about 14 inch, when it rose in a few seconds to 180°.[1]
Then follow the tabulated temperature results. Another experiment, described in the same paper, suffices to show that Dalton had pondered the discontinuity of matter thus early. Having mixed hot and cold water for half a minute, he proceeded to determine whether the upper layer became warmer than the lower. Observing that it did not, he remarked: "If the particles of water during the agitation had not
- ↑ Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, Vol. V., p. 381.
