[48] I am assured by one of his earliest friends, that, at this period, he did not appear even to have an idea of the value of property. Any thing not immediately necessary to him he gave away, and never retained a book after he had read it.
[49] He alludes to a rich piece of land near the river Parrot; a specimen of the soil of which Mr. Poole had sent him for analysis.
[50] Gregory Watt was one of those philosophers to whose memory justice has not awarded its due. He was a meteor, whose light no sooner flashed upon us than it expired. His paper upon the gradual refrigeration of Basalt, alone entitled him to a distinguished rank amongst experimentalists. It was read before the Royal Society in May; and he expired in the following October.
[51] There are some circumstances of interest connected with the history of this young man. He possessed much chemical talent; but during his residence in Ireland he was converted to the Catholic religion, and is at this time a Catholic priest in some part of the Continent.
[52] He means that the middle-men being discontinued, their large allotments should be divided into farms of convenient extent, the occupiers of which should rent immediately from the owners of the soil.
[53] The simple fact relating to the action of metals on the animal organs was certainly not first observed by Galvani, but by Sulzer, who has described the sensation of taste produced by the contact of lead and silver with the tongue, in his Théorie des Plaisirs, in 1767.
[54] M. Humboldt (Ueber die gereize Faser, l. 473, 1797,) quotes part of a letter from Dr. Ash, in which it is said that, "if two finely polished plates of homogeneous zinc be moistened and laid together, little effect follows; but if zinc and silver be tried in the same way, the whole surface of the silver will be covered with oxidated zinc. Lead and quicksilver act as powerfully upon each other, and so do iron and copper. M. Humboldt says, that, in repeating this experiment, he saw air bubbles ascend, which he supposes to have been hydrogen gas from the decomposition of water.
[55] As this lecture will be frequently mentioned in the progress of these Memoirs, in connexion with most important discoveries, it may be interesting to the reader to learn something of its foundation and design. I have therefore collected the necessary information from the Minutes of the Royal Society. Mr. Baker is well known in the history of Science, as an accurate observer with the microscope, and as the author of several works on the subject. By his will, dated July 1763, he bequeathed the sum of one hundred pounds, the interest of which he directed "to be applied for an Oration or Discourse, to be read or spoken yearly by some one of the Fellows of the Royal Society, on such parts of Natural History, or Experimental Philosophy, at such time, and in such manner, as the President and Council of the said Society shall please to order and appoint; on condition, nevertheless, that if any one year shall pass after the payment of the said hundred pounds, without such oration or discourse having been read or spoken at some Meeting of the said Royal Society, the said hundred pounds shall then become forfeited, and shall be repaid by the said Society to his executors," &c. Baker died in November 1774, and in the following year a Fellow was nominated to read the lecture. It is a whimsical circumstance, that the first lecturer should have been Peter Woulfe, the last of the alchemists. The names of the successive lecturers were as follow:—Dr. Ingenhouz, Mr. Cavallo, Mr. Vince, Dr. Wollaston, Dr. Young, Sir H. Davy, Mr. Brande, Captain Kater, Captain Edward Sabine, and Mr. Herschel.
[56] Nicholson's Journal, vol. iv. p. 190.