Overview
Edmund Goodwyn (1756-1829) was a fellow student with Beddoes at Edinburgh and the author of The Connexion of Life with Respiration; or, an Experimental Inquiry into the Effects of Submersion, Strangulation, and Several Kinds of Noxious Airs, on Living Animals: with an Account of the Nature of the Disease They Produce; Its Distinction from Death Itself; and the Most Effectual Means of Cure (London, 1788). This letter to Goodwyn introduces Beddoes’s translation of and commentary on the works of the seventeenth-century man of science John Mayow (1643-1679): Chemical Experiments and Opinions. Extracted from a Work Published in the Last Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1790). It is of significance in demonstrating Beddoes’s disinterested commitment to circulating scientific knowledge — Mayow’s work, Beddoes shows, anticipated the investigation of gases and their role in physiology being made in his own time by Joseph Black, Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier. The letter also exemplifies Beddoes’s tendencies to make loquacious, anecdotal digressions and to include in his publications personal addresses to other men of science. Depersonalised narration using the passive voice was not, in Beddoes’s view, a means to attain objectivity and authority as an author.



Thomas Beddoes to Edmund Goodwyn, 12 February 17901

I am not so unreasonable as to require you to remember every thing that passed in our correspondence, or in our various conversations at Edinburgh and at London, upon a subject, which three or four years ago, and indeed both at an earlier and later period, much employed your thoughts. You may however possibly recollect your offer to bestow upon a letter of mine the honour of annexing it to a certain treatise2 on the leading vital functions of superior animals: neither can you surely, any more than myself, have forgotten (for from whose memory are disappointments so soon effaced?) how, though in compliance with my wishes, and to encourage my design, you ventured to transmit your corrected manuscript to Oxford, accident totally deprived me of the advantage intended me by your kindness: for between my absence, and the negligence of those through whose hands it passed, I never received it, and, what would have been of much worse consequence, it had very nearly been lost.

Having thus been defrauded of the benefit of such an invitation to state more fully and explicitly what I had dropped in the looseness of conversation; and what you, I suspect, did not more than half believe, I deferred the execution of my purpose to a distant and indefinite day; my thoughts were diverted into other channels, and a doubt arose; no ill-timed doubt perhaps, how far my elucidation of an obscure but memorable passage in the History of Science would be of such importance as deserve separate publication, and so my intention became fainter and fainter, and was in a fair way to be laid aside for ever.

Opportunity, however, the power that prompts so many actions of man, has unexpectedly revived it. Hitherto, though I had often tried to procure for myself the Collection of Mayow’s treatises,3 I had only seen it in our Public Library, where the Dæmon of Frost, in league with such jealous regulations as the mature experience of Gottingen and Edinburgh has shewn to be unnecessary to the preservation of books,4 deprives us of a great part of the benefit it might afford, if our statutes a little less resembled, in the most abominable quality incident to human institutions, the laws of the Medes and Persians.5 At last, however, I had the good fortune to meet with a copy in private hands, and to be permitted to carry it away with me, and to keep it as long as I should desire. And now, as I again turned over the leaves, and mused at leisure over their extraordinary contents, my former sentiments, those sentiments by which I was first led to think of introducing to you modern philosophers, an ELDER BROTHER scarce more respectable than unknown, were renewed with undiminished force; and an additional circumstance gave fresh strength to my purpose.6

For in the mean time I had not failed to talk to others as to you, and in perhaps still stronger terms. I had even ventured publicly to bestow upon an author, of whom hardly any body had heard, commendations thought strongly to favour of extravagance and enthusiasm. They, however, had the effect of spreading a little the knowledge of his name, and in some measure of his writings; and should these make upon readers in general the same impression as they have lately made upon some, whose opinion may well pass for a very favourable omen, then due honours will at last be paid to the genius of Mayow, and perhaps a side glance of approbation may occasionally be cast upon the design of rescuing from oblivion his long-lost memory. Should I ask you, who of all your acquaintance is the person least likely to be overtaken by surprize, you would, I think, name a certain Northern Professor to whom you and I may have our obligations; and every one who has the good fortune to know him, must concur with you in opinion: Yet, at sight of the annexed representation of Mayow’s pneumatic apparatus, this sedate philosopher lifted up his hands in compleat astonishment.7 I could mention other instances equally in point; but when the evidence, as in the present case, is full and direct as the testimony of the senses, we seldom pay our own powers of perception so ill a compliment as to go to others in search of confirmation. I cannot, therefore say that my own conviction has been greatly strengthened by this coincidence. I own however that it is agreeable and flattering; and perhaps it has given my industry that spur which it so often needs.

But it is not with indolence alone that I have had to contend, it has also been necessary to prevail over prudence, and the victory has not been accomplished without a struggle. For besides the risque encountered by all who expose themselves to general censure, there are, I am apprehensive, several circumstances that aggravate the imprudence of the step I am about to take.

Mayow himself certainly will not reward the flattery or praise which he can no longer hear. What pity, that he should have left behind him no posterity whose bounty may fill the hand that draws aside the veil which time and chance have thrown over the glory of their ancestor! In this penury of natural patronage who would not have looked out for a Peer at least, connected by a common college or some imaginary tie with the philosophical hero whose memory he was endeavouring to revive? Instead of this, behold in the very spot consecrated to dedication a plain and familiar letter to a person who has none of those things to bestow,8 after which we writers so hunger and so thirst. If there be in all this a vestige of prudence I would gladly know, what you call inconsiderate and thoughtless?

Still, I fear, there may be worse behind. Mine is not by many the first attempt to refer modern advances in science to an earlier date. Numbers before me have repeated that there is no thing new under the Sun, and I for one have generally heard the exclamation with inattention or contempt. — Sometimes I have fancied I perceived nerveless Ingenuity straining in vain to pile up mountains of paradox; sometimes it has been Ostentation displaying a mouldy store of captious and quibbling erudition, and sometimes, I am afraid, Malice, in the spirit of Macbeth’s Weird Sisters, employing her spells and incantations to blast living reputation.9

Here excuse me for a moment; for I am violently tempted to step aside, you, I trust, will admit the force of the temptation; it is to gather an anecdote; the bye path that leads to it will immediately return into the main road. I once happened to meet with the person who for five and twenty years had been Voltaire’s amanuensis; I would tell you his name; but alas! I begin to find that names and numbers too easily slide out of my memory.10 He shewed me a book that had belonged to his employer: I thought it a great curiosity; not that I should value a book a rush the more, had it merely belonged to a greater than Voltaire; but in this book might be seen something of the method by which a writer of genius prepared himself for the exercise of his art. The margin was crouded with remarks all lively and keen (such was the nature of the man) most of them pertinent. — Slight as he may often have been found in his enquiries as he was sometimes sufficiently malicious in his disposition, — in short a moral and intellectual character chequered with light and shade. I saw not here a trace of that picture which we are so apt to summon before us; of the superficial Frenchman misunderstanding in his hastę what stood distinctly in print before him, and in the fermentation of fancy substituting sentiments quite foreign to those of the author. On the contrary he read with his thoughts collected and his attention riveted; nothing inconsistent or inconclusive seemed to escape him; and he condensed many observations into a line, which had there been space, he might reasonably have spread over a page.

Among these, I was much struck with one at the time, and it now returns upon me with double force.

It so happened that those phænomena of literature, on which I have just been bestowing a few metaphors, the classical or antiquarian bigots who have laid out their learning in efforts to adorn the hoary head of antiquity with the laurels of modern merit, came across the author’s imagination; and from among them one of the most liberal, I mean to the dead — was quoted as advancing that certain recent theories were known to the ancients. ‘Non’, exclaims the sarcastic commentator, ‘il ne le croit pas lui-même: il l’a seulement imprime’.11

Whether this stricture be just or only shrewd, you, if you will take the trouble of comparing it with your experience and observation, shall judge for yourself. I should very solemnly: protest against its application, if the reader’s sentence were to be regulated by my protestations and not by the evidence which I shall produce. I can indeed conceive that it may be flattering enough to look down from the high watch-tower of wisdom.

Sapientum templa serena
Despicere unde queas alios passimque videre
Errantes12 —

And I might perhaps be mischievous or frolicsome enough, but I own I want the courage to attempt to send, like April fools, in quest of an Utopian wonder, so much gravity and decorum as is comprehended under the large and venerable title of the Public. Jokes like these could hardly be practised with safety, but upon inferiors or dependants or very familiar friends. Authors indeed there may have been on so safe a footing with the world; whose assertion would pass for proof, and who might have ventured upon liberties, but it was first necessary to have established their credit by much and effectual service – need I make the application to your correspondent?

But when you recollect how strangely discoveries have been sometimes appropriated; how Solomon, Plato, and Father Paul have severally been invested with the honour which Harvey derives from his investigation of the circuit of the blood, you may be reasonably desirous to know on what principles I would have the merit of claimants decided.13 If by a loose expression, which he who used it, in all likelihood, threw out at random, and which impressed no idea upon the understanding of his contemporaries, then the sooner you contrivers of difficult and decisive experiments put a ‘stop’ to your researches, the less you will lose of your labour. In self-defence, therefore, and lest we be degraded into mere interpreters of mysticism and nonsense, it will be necessary to deal strictly with these pretensions of antiquity. I know indeed that the glance of genius has now and then anticipated the tardy result of investigation: and I acknowledge both the merit and utility of such happy conjectures. They are, as Haller well entitles them, ‘scintillæ ad experimenta prælucentes’, sparks such as kindle the light of experiment: yet how little do they detract from the praise due to those by whose more perfect labour the truth is exactly defined and firmly established?14 neither will they easily be made by chance; nor otherwise than by first clearly ascertaining or at least conceiving extensive principles, then rendering them familiar to the mind by reflection, and lastly pursuing the clue of analogy, where ever it leads from them.

In the examination of such claims two things at least require attention. It should first be enquired what has been expressed, and next what has been proved. If the proofs be not cogent, then the honours due to discovery may be justly denied; and if deficient proof be accompanied by ambiguity of expression, may we not lay it down as highly probable that the passage bears some other meaning than that which coincides with the modern opinion? for to divine the secrets of Nature is by no means a characteristic of man; and very often we are acquainted with distant facts amounting to the proof of a proposition, before we draw them together and make the inference.

Upon the whole I should be ashamed to stand up in support of any one who should shrink from the test of Pitcairne and Haller: ‘non eum verum inventorem esse cui vaga aliqua cogitatio elapsa est, in nullo fundata experimento, sed eum omnino eam laudem mereri qui verum ex suis fontibus per sua pericula suasque meditationes eruerit et adeo firmis rationibus stabiliverit ut veri cupidos convincant’.15

If therefore Mayow has not clearly expressed his opinions, if he uses such ambiguous terms as require the assistance of modern discoveries to interpret them, if his experiments do not afford decisive evidence, if he has not deduced the consequences of his principles, then I am willing that the credit of one, who discovered far and that by the light of his own genius, should be withheld from him in as much as he has failed in any of these requisites. I can just conceive it possible that a single important discovery may be made without much sagacity: an undiscerning eye may perhaps by chance be so placed as to be aware of the manner in which nature performs some one of her hidden operations; but he who shall surprize her often, must be allowed to have the discerning eye, and to know where the proper point of view is to be found.

Then if we wish to make an estimate of merit, we must compare circumstances, and above everything consider the imitative genius of man; for experience evinces that whatever we are capable of performing from the grossest mechanical application of the hand to the most refined operation of the intellect loses half its difficulty when we have once a pattern before us. It is not much that modern versifyers are smoother than of old; it is not much that modern experiments are more conclusive, and modern reasoning more justly drawn out from them, for there stand the living examples full in our view; and we have only the easier task of expressing them by a resembling imitation. But let any one shew me where Mayow might find formulas ready to his hands by which he could regulate his facts and his reasonings; a set of experiments bearing so directly on the point at which he aimed; or a chain of consequences deduced with sagacity equally enlightened, and so much patience of thought. Consider only the quantity or mass of truths which he surely detected ‘per sua pericula suasque meditationes’16 and then name among his predecessors or contemporaries, I had almost rashly added – or his successors, a rival fitted to contend with him for the palm of philosophy. But when you attend to its quality, you will see that he anticipated the discoveries of succeeding ages, and was scarce subject to the laws by which other minds are regulated in their researches into nature; for experience shews, and it is agreeable to what we know of the human understanding, that our acquaintance with the material world proceeds in a regular train; and that before we can arrive at a given discovery, a certain sum of preparatory knowledge must be accumulated. Thus you yourself, when speaking of one of those points which Mayow has most happily illustrated, observe that ‘the respiration of animals has long been a difficult point in Physiology, and no satisfactory solution could be given of it whilst Chymistry continued in an uncultivated state: the general facts were indeed attended to and conjectures proposed to explain them;17 but as long as conjecture only was used, doubt and uncertainty remained.

Within these few years the knowledge of Chymistry has been much improved, and experiments have been applied to respiration with considerable effect; new facts have been discovered, extraordinary phænomena explained, and considerable difficulties removed.’18

The accidental appearance of a great genius may indeed hasten the pace of philosophy, yet is its fate independent of individuals: Had Newton never existed, is it possible, think you, that astronomy should have rested where he took it up; would not rather twenty successive Keplers have divided among them the labour of the Heavens? 19

Newton’s discoveries concerning light, I cannot help fancying, stand in the same predicament with Mayow’s on air to me both exhibit themselves as the greatest deviations, presented by the whole history of Science, from the ordinary and natural progress of knowledge; they would undoubtedly (we see that it has actually happened in the one case) they would undoubtedly have been sometime made, but not till a century or two had improved the talent both of observation and of reflection; though our two illustrious countrymen, like the Progenitor of mankind when the Archangel had purged his sight

‘with euphrasy and rue’

were, by a peculiar privilege, admitted to the view of scenes reserved for a distant posterity.20

The writings of Descartes, indeed, so much studied in that age, might excite Newton to investigate the nature of light.21 What determined Mayow to his particular researches? not, I think, the experiments of Boyle, so much as those of Torricelli; after them the study of air languished, and has only been fully revived of late. 22

Is not the general order of discovery influenced by at least two great principles? If invention is sharpened by necessity, will not, in the first place, those qualities of objects be most likely to come soonest forward to our notice in which we are most interested? but, secondly, the fulfilment of our wants and wishes must be regulated by our powers; hence we shall be apt to meet with the first success in the easiest enquiries, or, to express myself with somewhat greater precision, in those where effects are most apparent to the senses. I shall not presume to decide which of the two great branches of Natural Philosophy contributes most to the use and ornament of life; but I think it natural that the mechanical department, where palpable masses of matter are brought into action, and motion is visible in its progress; should sooner advance towards perfection than the chemical, where effects are produced by the insensible movements of imperceptible particles. It seems therefore to have its foundation in the order of things that the philosophers of the preceding age should have been employed chiefly by Astronomy and Mechanics, and those of the present by Chemistry. Yet if the rule be at all just, what a violent exception — suffer me to repeat it — have we in the instance of Mayow, who silently and unperceived in the obscurity of the last century, discovered, if not the whole sum and substance, yet certainly many of those splendid truths which adorn the writings of Priestley, Scheele, Lavoisier, Crawford, Goodwyn, and other philosophers of this day?23

He threw away with scorn the vague ideas annexed by the old chymists to the terms sulphur, mercury, &c. He has clearly presented the notion of phlogiston, which rendered the name of Stahl so celebrated.24 He perceived the action of dephlogisticated air in almost all the wide extent of its influence; he was acquainted with the composition of the atmosphere, and contrived to make the mixture of nitrous and atmospherical air. He was well aware of the cause of the increase of weight in metallic calces, and distinctly asserted that certain bases are rendered acid by the accession of nitro-atmospherical particles, or what has since been denominated the acidifying principle. He discovered the method of producing factitious gas, and observed its permanent elasticity; and what is still more strange, he invented the nice art of transferring it from vessel to vessel. The doctrine of respiration is all his own. He has carried on his investigation of this function from the diminution of the air by the breathing of animals (as well as the burning of bodies) to the change it produces in the blood during its passage through the lungs and the use of the placenta. But the number and extent of his discoveries will best appear from the following analysis. It would how ever be uncandid and foolish not to acknowledge that he too has paid the tribute of error, which, according to Senac’s expression, is still due from human imperfection.25 His mind, as usually happens from the impulse of new discoveries, was transported too far in its ardour; and he has extended his principles beyond the bounds of truth. But let us remember that the philosopher who opened to the view of modern times the operations of that very class of agents, which Mayow in vain pointed out to his contemporaries, once imagined that metals in their state of calx might become heavier from acquiring fixed air. But does an erroneous conjecture take away from the general merit or the force of his proof where it compleatly ascertains the properties of this elastic fluid? Though Mayow imputed thunder and lightning to his powerful principle, the experimental evidence of its real effects should certainly not be thought to suffer from that mistake. The cause of each mistake scarce requires to be told. Nature, we now know, employs different elastic fluids to execute many of her purposes; but how, unless we expect an individual to find out every thing at once, can we wonder, if upon the first discovery of one of the most powerful of these agents, the sphere of its dominion should be too widely extended, while the claims of its rivals are yet unknown? But I will interfere no further with the reader’s speculations: upon the mixture of truth and error, which the pages of Mayow may contain. The following table of contents will render any observations of mine superfluous: it is a close translation from the original, except in one or two places, where, for the sake of perspicuity, I have exchanged the notices of the index for the fuller expressions of the text. It may be considered as a faithful map of the author’s opinions; and will serve to shew not only where but how he was misled; I presume at least, that by the help of this table, and the subjoined analysis, any one acquainted with the outlines of Chemistry may perceive the progress by which his opinions successively ramified from the trunk of his principles.

In this analysis the chemical doctrines of the author have been my object. The Collection of Tracts is divided by himself into two parts, of which the latter contains two essays; one on muscular motion, and one on the rickets.26 It seems as if the three essays of the former part were those, to which he rather chose to entrust his reputation, or which he at least regarded with most affection; since in his dedication he brings them forward to the notice of his patron, with the confidence of a man who feels how much he has enriched philosophy.27 ‘These exercises,’ says he, ‘will, I flatter myself, suggest reflections capable of filling up a few hours of leisure usefully and agreeably. In the essay on respiration, the whole machinery of the thorax is taken to pieces and the cause of many effects explained from anatomical experiments: and what I have written of nitre, pervades almost the whole of nature, and explains many abstruse things, upon which of the innumerable crowd of writers scarce any one has ventured to touch: and though some other points have been treated also by other authors, yet have they been left in obscurity.’ Perhaps, however, he thought the two last essays more confined by their subject to a particular profession, and therefore less likely to engage the attention of Coventry. They do not fall within my design, but in order to satisfy the reader’s curiosity, I have hastily run over their contents.

In extracting and abridging those parts of the three first treatises that relate to Chemistry, I have aimed at presenting the author’s opinions just as he conceived them. During the performance of this task it was some relief to intersperse a few reflections, such as arose without enquiry or pre-meditation; may the reader derive equal refreshment from them. The experiments, by which the author’s merit must principally be decided, are related at length in his own terms. They are far from numerous; yet do they not afford full proof of the inferences; and what more can we desire? Here I think we have evidence of superior sagacity that cannot be controverted; for the talent of contriving an experimentum crucis, of making the powers of bodies exert themselves in such a manner as to exclude all hypotheses but one, will be found very sparingly distributed among the experimenters of every age.

He who discovers new things, necessarily brings upon himself the task of inventing new names: a task which the experience of our own times has abundantly shewn not to be easy: yet in the language of Mayow, who denominates substances from some of their properties, there is nothing obscure, and perhaps, nothing more harsh than may be found in later writers, and is universally felt in new terms: He calls the great principle which he has pursued so far through nature, by a variety of titles: vital salt, because this peculiar kind of air is necessary to respiration: igneous salt, because it is necessary, to the support of fire; the term salt seems in his time to have been very indefinite; sometimes it is denominated fire-air particles; and in this particular, the coincidence between the terms of two great Chemists of different ages, Scheele and Mayow, is remarkable; for it is to be observed, that in Scheele’s original treatise on Air and Fire, there is no foundation for the vague poetical term empyreal, which has been introduced among so many other mistakes in the English translation.28 The author, bearing in mind one of its most remarkable qualities, and taking advantage of a language more flexible perhaps than any other to apply itself to new conceptions of the mind, compounded, as Mayow had done before him, the precise term, feuer-luft, fire-air: nitro-atmospherical, nitro-aerial spirit, or particles, is another name frequently used as synonymous with the preceding, and sufficiently expressive of a principle common both to nitre and the atmosphere.

Notwithstanding the length to which this letter has been protracted, you, I trust, and every reader, will yet have a little attention left for the particulars of Mayow’s life, as far as they can be collected, and a few observations on the fate of his writings. Wood furnishes little else besides a few dates, and these, however scanty they may appear, are almost, I am afraid, all the memorials that remain.29

‘John Mayow,’ he informs us, ‘descended from a genteel family of his name, living at Bree, in Cornwall, was born in the parish of St. Dunstan’s in the West, in Fleet-street, London, admitted a scholar of Wadham College, the 27th of September, 1661, aged 16 years, chose probationary-fellow of All Souls College soon after, upon the recommendation of Henry Coventry, Esq. one of the Secretaries of State, where, though he had a Legist’s Place, and took the degrees of Civil Law, yet he studied physic, and became noted for his practice therein, especially in the summer-time, in the city of Bath, but better known by these books, which shew the pregnancy of his parts.30

Of both which tracts is a large account given in the Phil. Tr. No. 41, p. 803. an. 1668.31

Of these three last (which were printed again with the two first) is a large account given in the Phil. Tr. No. 105, p. 101, &c. and all five were printed together at the Hague, 1681, 8vo.32 He paid his last debt to nature in an apothecary’s house, bearing the sign of the Anchor, in York-street, near Covent-Garden, within the liberty of Westminster, (having been married a little before, not altogether to his content) in the month of September, 1679, and was buried in the Church of St. Paul, Covent-Garden.’33

This short narrative shews, that on account either of his patron or his merit, some favour was shewn him at his reception into All Soul’s College. For of the forty fellows of that society, sixteen are free from the obligation of entering into orders, and the offices of the college devolve oftener upon them in the inverse proportion of the numbers.

This privilege is conferred by the Warden, and those, who enjoy it, are now called Jurists, with which I suppose Wood’s term Legist to be synonymous.

The comparison of the dates supplied by the Oxford antiquary will shew, that the treatise on Respiration was published in his twenty-third year; the treatise itself shews, that he had already made those discoveries which he afterwards related at greater length in the treatise that now stands first in the collection. Intellectual eminence, if I am not much mistaken, is far more early attainable in those things which depend upon books and the internal workings of the mind, than in the observation of nature. Is there any other instance of one, who had so soon discovered a system of natural operations so extensive and so remote from the common apprehension of his times? The Vice Chancellor’s permission for printing the collection of his tracts is dated July 17, 1673, that is, in his 28th, or early in his 29th year!

I know not whether there may not be perceived in the ‘large account’ of the three latter treatises, in the Transactions, something of an attempt to exalt Boyle at Mayow’s expence;34 an attempt not necessary to support the reputation, and surely altogether repugnant to the mild and modest disposition, of that most amiable of philosophers. Did any sparks, left here by the meeting of philosophers, which afterwards grew into the Royal Society, fire the genius of Mayow? He certainly never figured among that body; as he would have done on his removal to London, if he had not died so much too soon for Science.

It may be added from Jocher,35 that the Dutch not only reprinted, but translated Mayow’s works soon after their appearance; an honour which they did not obtain from any other people.

The same Lexicographer on the authority, I believe, of Morhof’s Polyhistor,36 affirms, that in his own age, his philosophy found very little approbation. So much does the fortune, both of truth itself, and of those who speak it, depend upon the disposition of the times in which it is spoken. His name, therefore, as it never was echoed by popular applause, was soon forgotten among men and his memory obliterated. In the Biographia Britannica there is no article appropriated to him, and what perhaps is more extraordinary, I think he is never mentioned by the biographer of the other great philosopher of the same period.37 Mr Lavoisier, in the historical part of his Essays passes on from Paracelsus and Helmont;38 to Boyle and Hales39 (who quotes Mayow’s experiments on respiration and combustion) probably without suspecting the existence of such an author. From Haller, whom nothing totally escapes, he has obtained some regard, though that learned physiologist had a very inadequate idea of his merit. You recollect that in the catalogue annexed to the last volume of the Elements of Physiology, the author has marked those books which contain any thing original with a single asterisk, and those which he entirely approved with two. In this catalogue, Mayow’s treatise on respiration is honoured with a single note of approbation, but the Collection of his works is left undistinguished from the herd of books manufactured by the pen or the scissars alone. In the body of that great work, he is occasionally quoted, and once at least with honour: thus, ‘aer imprimis elaterem suum amittit per ipsam respirationem animalis. Primus id observavit Johannes Mayow.’40 He is also mentioned as the first modern who supposed the office of the placenta to be the same as that of the lungs, for to Hippocrates this notion is likewise attributed. How far what is said of Mayow, in the English translation of Scheele’s Essay on Air and Fire, has been effectual in directing the public curiosity towards his works, I can scarce tell, but I do not myself know any person who was led to seek them by that recommendation, if recommendation it may be called, that degrades an experimental investigation to obscure hints. ‘John Mayow,’ we are told, ‘in his Opera Omnia, &c. Hague, 1681, has already given some obscure hints about that part of our common atmospherical air, which properly speaking, is the most proper’ (properly speaking, is it not the only proper?) ‘for respiration, or in which the flame of a candle will burn longer than in the same bulk of our mixed common air.’ . . . ‘Mayow pretends’(he pretends no such thing) ‘that some salt-petre, or even aerial spirit of nitre, flies about in the air, which when breathed, enters the lungs, and yields in the human body the animal spirits and heat, which it communicates to the mass of blood. By respiration the air loses that elasticity which it had obtained from that kind of nitre, which he supposes in common air. – This dephlogisticated air, though very obscurely, seems to be hinted at in the Diss. de Sal-nitro and also de respiratione – The honour of the discovery of this kind of air, is so much the property of Dr Priestley and Mr Scheele, though neither knew of the other’s experiments, that there is not the least doubt about it: but is it less certain that Mayow proved his theory in a manner so little convincing by experiments, that he cannot have the least claim to any discovery? It is only curious that a loose, hint, thrown out at random, in that age, should at such a distance of time, in a new, more circumstantial, and ample manner be confirmed in a series of experiments, by two philosophers, who certainly knew nothing of Mayow’.41 Should it be asked, if the author of this note had read Mayow, and should it be replied, Yes; then let it again be asked, if he understood him; will that question also be answered in the affirmative? One late writer on Physiology, I see, has been fully aware of the nature and importance of Mayow’s discoveries.42 ‘Magna jam pars memorabilium horum phænomenorum,’ says he, speaking of respiration, ‘quibus nuperis lustris et physica de aeribus factitiis disciplina et physiologia negotii respirationis tam egregié ditata et illustrata est, jam ante centum et quod excurrit annos innotuit acutissimi ingenii medico Joanni Mayow, cujus de sal-nitro et Spiritu nitro aereo (quo nempe nomine dephlogisticatum aerem insignivit) tractatum, Oxon. 1674, 8vo. editum, magna cum voluptate legi et relegit’.43

I have now quoted latin more than enough to season any letter, and more, I suspect, than will abide the tests of classical purity: it is usual, you know, with the philologists to collect together, and add to the works of the author whom they publish, (scarce, I imagine, for the purpose of diminishing the size or price of the book) almost every thing that others have said concerning him: but, as I by no means wish to see this practice introduced into books of science, I shall trouble you with no more testimonies. I have deduced, as well as I could, the history of Mayow’s writings to our own time. Henceforward, I flatter myself, that he will share the glory of Verulam and Newton,44 and be named with due respect by all, by those especially who have never looked into his works; and that when the enthusiasm of an Englishman salutes his country, as

Mayow will be ranked among the noblest productions of the latter sort.

Should any one now enquire, in the simplicity of his heart, — for if the question were dictated by any other spirit, I should bid the enquirer seek information for himself – whether the sum of honour, due to the moderns, is to be found by subtracting the share of Mayow, let him be assured, that the discoveries of our times set out from a different point, and proceeded in a different train, in perfect ignorance of him, and therefore without any assistance from him.

When I resumed the purpose mentioned at the beginning of this letter, I destined the execution of it to be the employment of a few winter days, and intended to offer it as one of those little presents, to which the custom of a late season gives occasion. Delay, however, I believe, and enlargement beyond the original conception, are very incident to authors. From the delay, as I was not impatient for publication, I have felt no disappointment; but I wish, too late, that I had confined my account within a narrower space. Such as it is, it must pass the fatal boundary that divides an author from the public; for the press is even now about to close upon my last words its ponderous and iron jaws: And circumstances no longer permit me to new-model this slender MONUMENT to NEGLECTED GENIUS. Whether it be worthy of HIM in honour of whom it is erected, or HE be worthy of the labour of the Architect, now remains to be determined chiefly by those who as yet know little of either. –

By one, at least, I am sure the workmanship will be viewed with all the indulgence that can be desired by

HIS FRIEND

THOMAS BEDDOES.

.

OXFORD,

FEBRUARY. 12, 1790.


Published: John Mayow (ed. Thomas Beddoes), Chemical Experiments and Opinions. Extracted from a Work Published in the Last Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, sold by D. Prince and J. Cooke, and J. Fletcher, Oxford and J. Murray, London, 1790).


Notes

1.This letter serves as a preface to Beddoes’s translation of and commentary on the work of John Mayow (1643-1679), Chemical Experiments and Opinions. Extracted from a Work Published in the Last Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1790). Mayow had made significant advances in studying the composition of air and in understanding combustion and respiration as chemical processes. Chemical gives translated and abridged selections from Mayow’s five published tracts, with the aim of ‘presenting the author’s opinions just as he conceived them’, followed by Beddoes’s extended and celebratory ‘Analysis of Mayow’s Chemical Opinions’.

2. [Beddoes’s note: The Connexion of Life with Respiration. By Edmund Goodwyn, M.D. 1788]. In this text, Goodwyn describes the experiments on animals that he conducted so as to ascertain the chemical changes in the breath during the process of respiration and expiration. He experimentally refuted the belief of Albrecht von Haller (1708-77) that the shortening of the pulmonary vessels during expiration obstructed the passage of blood through them, and he explored alternative means for artificial respiration. He also attempted to overthrow notions of ‘suspended animation’, concluding that ‘of animal bodies there are only two general conditions, Life and Death’, and warning of the dangers involved in resuscitating a lifeless mass (Goodwyn, The Connexion of Life with Respiration, p. 99).

3.[Beddoes’s note: Tractatus quinque Medico-physici. Studio Johannis Mayow, LL D. et Medici; necnon Coll. Omn. Anim. in Univ. Oxon. Socii. Oxon. 1674. Copies, I have been told, though of another edition, are more common abroad. I could never find the original edition of the second treatise, See below, P. XXX]. Here, Beddoes is referring to the discussion of Mayow’s Tractatus quinque medico-physici (1674) that he had derived from the dictionary of biography, Athenae Oxonienses (1691-92). See note 33 below.

4. Beddoes was becoming disillusioned with Oxford’s bureaucratic processes, and with the Bodleian library. In 1787, he published a nineteen-page pamphlet, A Memorial Concerning the State of the Bodleian Library, and the Conduct of the Principal Librarian, levelling a host of criticisms at Bodley’s Librarian, Rev. John Price (1735-1813), at the library’s acquisition policy, and its lack of holdings in non-English works, by comparison with the libraries of Göttingen and Edinburgh (see ETB, pp. 176-79). In 1791 he wrote to his former lecturer at Edinburgh, Joseph Black (1728-1799), that ‘Science & Chemistry in particular will never flourish here much under the shadow of ecclesiastical & scholastic institutions’ (Thomas Beddoes to Joseph Black, 15 April [1791]).

5.Beddoes suggests that their statutes were unalterable, using an idiom taken from the Book of Daniel, 6:8: ‘Now, O king, establish the decree, and sign the writing, that it be not changed, according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, which altereth not’.

6. Beddoes also cites Mayow as an early influence in an account of his interest in, and the broader progress of, pneumatic medicine in a letter to Erasmus Darwin, 30 June 1793.

7. Joseph Black, to whom Beddoes and Goodwyn were both indebted for their initial ideas on new kinds of air, having attended his lectures at Edinburgh. Black’s astonishment was at the similarity between Mayow’s experimental apparatus and that used more recently by chemists Stephen Hales (1677-1761), Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). See ETB, pp. 32-37 and Figs. 1.5-1.8.

8. Beddoes’s dedication is a familiar letter to Goodwyn, rather than a more typical address to a noble patron.

9. In Macbeth, the three witches, or Weïrd Sisters, prophesy Macbeth’s rise to kingship and his downfall.

10. Jean-Louis Wagnière (1739-1802) was Voltaire’s secretary for twenty-four years, from 1755 until Voltaire’s death in 1778.

11. ‘No, he doesn’t himself believe it: he merely printed it’.

12. Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book II, line 8-10. Translation (Loeb Classical Library): ‘But nothing is more delightful than to possess lofty sanctuaries serene, well fortified by the teachings of the wise, whence you may look down upon others and behold them all astray, wandering abroad’.

13. William Harvey (1578-1657) was the first to give a complete, detailed and experimentally supported account of the systematic circulation of the blood to the body and brain by the heart, in Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1628).

14. Haller, a Swiss anatomist and physiologist, had been the pupil of Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738). He performed extensive laboratory experiments with his colleague J. G. Zimmerman (1728-95) to advance Francis Glisson’s theory of ‘irritabilitias’, in which muscles contract on contact with external stimuli, and to identify pain as dependent on the presence of nerves. His eight-volume Elementa physiologiae Corporis (1757-66), which Beddoes quotes here and below, developed work by Johannes Walaeus (1604-49) and by Harvey. It was the first comprehensive manual of anatomy and physiology and, through a scheme of experimental pathology, offered new conceptions of the circulation of the blood through blood vessels and of the effects of vivisection. The quotation appears in the second volume on p. 359.

15. [Beddoes’s note: Elem. Physiologie, I. p. 247]. Haller, Elementa physiologiae Corporis, I, 247. The Latin translates as ‘he was not the originator to whom some passing idea, not founded on experiment, had occurred; rather, he deserves that praise that is due to him who has discovered the truth from his own sources and through his own trials [experiments] and reflections, and has so firmly established it on a rational basis as to convince those who are desirous of it’. Haller is commenting on the predecessors of Harvey in discoveries regarding the circulation of the blood. Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713), the Scottish physician, who worked in Leiden and Edinburgh, was a colleague of David Gregory (1659-1708), and tutor to George Cheyne (1672-1743) and to Boerhaave.

16.‘through his trials/experiments and reflections’.

17. [Beddoes’s note: Sir I. Newton imagined that the atmospheric air might communicate an acid vapour to the blood of the lungs, which was necessary to keep up the action of the heart. Optics, p. 353.] Beddoes is quoting from Goodwyn, The Connexion of Life with Respiration, pp. viii-ix. His note is a replication of Goodwyn’s footnote, which in turn cites Isaac Newton’s Optics: ‘For the Air abounds with acid Vapours fit to promote Fermentations, as appears by the rusting of Iron and Copper in it, the kindling of Fire by blowing, and the beating of the Heart by means of Respiration.’ (Isaac Newton, Optics: Or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 4th edn [London, 1730], Book III, p. 355). There is a misprint in Beddoes’s note: the relevant passage in Optics appears, as Goodwyn has it, on p. 355.

18. [Beddoes’s note: Connexion of life, &c. Introduction, p. 8]. Beddoes is quoting from Goodwyn, The Connexion of Life with Respiration, pp. viii-ix.

19. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) revolutionised planetary astronomy in his Principia Mathematica (1687) by formulating the universal laws of motion and of universal gravitation, by mathematically describing gravity, and by demonstrating that the motion of objects and celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles. The laws of planetary motion established by the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) laid the foundations for Newton’s theories.

20. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1674), Book 11, line 414.

21. The mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) developed a corpuscularian theory of matter and motion, denouncing atoms-and-void theories of matter, and understanding air as composed of many small parts, around which light was communicated. Newton advanced questions encapsulated in Descartes’s work by investigating the qualities and nature of light — in ‘New Theory about Light and Colours’, PTRS, 80 (1672), 3075-87, and Optics (London, 1704). In his thinking he engaged deeply with (but was ultimately critical of) Descartes’s arguments on space, time, and motion.

22. Beddoes identifies Mayow’s key inspiration as Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47), the Italian physicist and mathematician who created the first recorded permanent vacuum (the Torricellian vacuum), and the first barometer. Robert Boyle (1627-91) also advanced knowledge of air pressure and its physical characteristics — including its role in combustion and respiration — using the air pump that he constructed with Robert Hooke (1635-1703) in 1659. Mayow recounts an experiment performed by Boyle (Chemical Experiments, pp. 34-37), but there seems to have been little direct connection between the two men (J. R. Partington, ‘The Life and Work of John Mayow (1641-1679). Part One,’ Isis, 47 (1956), 218-19).

23. Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-86), the Swedish chemist who discovered oxygen independently of Joseph Priestley. Beddoes would translate his work — The Chemical Essays of Charles-William Scheele, Translated from the Transactions of the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, trans. and ed. Thomas Beddoes (London: printed for J. Murray, W. Gordon and C. Elliott, Edinburgh, 1786). Adair Crawford (1748-1795) was a chemist and physician who proved that respiratory gas exchange in animals involved combustion.

24. The dominant chemical theory, by Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734), held that all combustible substances were composed partly of a hypothetical substance called phlogiston, that was thought to be released on burning. This theory was discredited by Lavoisier.

25. The expression ‘errare humanum est’, or ‘to err is human,’ is sometimes attributed to Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC-AD 65). Alexander Pope (1688-1744) adapted the phrase in his Essay on Criticism (London, 1711), p. 30: ‘to Err is Human; to Forgive, Divine’.

26. The Tractatus qunique medico-physici (1674) comprises five tracts, in this order: De sal nitro, et Spiritu nitro-aereo on the vital forces in air and combustion; De respiratione, on the chemical role of air in respiration; De Respiratione foetus in utero, et ovo, on the respiration of the foetus in utero; De Rhachitide, on rickets; and De Motu Musculari, et spiritibus animalibus on muscular motion. The tracts on respiration and rickets were first published in 1668 as Tractatus duo Quorum.

27. Henry Coventry (1619-1686), Secretary of State. He recommended Mayow to a Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1660, and was the dedicatee of Tractatus.

28. Scheele, Chemische Abhandlung von der Luft und dem Feuer (Uppsala and Leipzig, 1777). Scheele’s text was translated as Chemical Observations and Experiments on Air and Fire, trans. Johann Reinhold Forster (London, 1780).

29. Anthony À Wood (1632-95), the Oxford-based antiquarian, whose Athenae Oxonienses, which Beddoes goes on to quote, comprised one of the earliest attempts at a dictionary of biography.

30. More recent scholarship has proved Wood’s dating to be incorrect: Mayow was born in Morval in Cornwall in 1641; he matriculated on 2 July 1658 at Wadham College and was admitted scholar on 23 September 1659; at the recommendation of Coventry he was elected Fellow of All Souls College in 1660 (J. R. Partington, ‘The Life and Work of John Mayow (1641-1679). Part One,’ Isis, 47 (1956), 218-19).

31. ‘An account of two books’, PTRS, 41 (1668), 833-36.

32.‘An Accompt of two Books’, PTRS, 105 (1674), 101-20.

33. [Beddoes’s note: Wood’s Athena Oxon. II. 637.1722.]. See Anthony À Wood, Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers who have had their Education at the University of Oxford (London, Rivington, 1817), III, p. 119.

34.‘An Accompt of two Books’, PTRS, 105 (1674), 101-20.

35. [Beddoes’s note: Gelehrten Lexicon. Art. Mayow]. Beddoes refers to the lexicon compiled by Leipzig-based Christian Gottlieb Jöcher (1694-1758): Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon, 4 vols (Leipzig, 1733-51), III, p. 333.

36. [Beddoes’s note: I wished to see the passage in which this circumstance is related, but alas, Morhof’s Miscellany is without an index – that principle which preserves so many old books from total decay, and the want of which in so many modern books – but why should I raise melancholy ideas in the minds of my contemporaries?] Daniel Georg Morhof (1639-91) was a German writer and scholar who spent his career at the University of Kiel. His key writings were Unterricht von der deutschen Sprache und Poesie (Kiel, 1682) – the first attempt in Germany at a systematic survey of literature – and the text that Beddoes references here, an extensive history of learning, Polyhistor, sive de auctorum notitia et rerum commentarii (Lübeck, 1688-92).

37. [Beddoes’s note: Birch’s life of Boyle prefixed to his works, and separately printed in octavo.] Thomas Birch (1705-66) was an editor, compiler of histories, biographer, and secretary of the Royal Society from 1752-65. He published The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, 5 vols (London, 1744), introduced with a biography of Boyle that was also separately published as The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle (London, 1744).

38. Antoine Lavoisier, Essays Physical and Chemical, trans. Thomas Henry (London, 1776), contains an ‘Historical Account’ of previous discoveries in combustion and fermentation. Lavoisier mentions the work of Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541), the German-Swiss physician and alchemist who established the role of chemistry in medicine, and his disciple Jan Baptista van Helmont (1580-1644) who recognized the existence of discrete gases and identified carbon dioxide (Essays Physical and Chemical, I, pp. 4-8).

39. Lavoisier describes Boyle’s replication of Van Helmont’s experiments in vacuo, using the air pump, and identifies Hales as the first to perform experiments to ascertain the quantities of air produced and absorbed in combustion, fermentation and in combinations.

40. [Beddoes’s note: Elem. Phys. III, 206]. Haller, Elementa Physiologiae Corporis, III, p. 206. ‘The air, in particular, loses its elasticity through the animal’s respiration itself. This was first observed by John Mayow’.

41. [Beddoes’s note: Obs. on Air and Fire. Note at the end of the author’s preface, p. xiii.] Beddoes refers to the faint praise of Mayow offered by Johann Reinhold Forster (1729-98) in a note to his translation of Scheele: Chemical Observations and Experiments on Air and Fire, pp. xiii-xiv. Forster’s source was the 1681 reprint of John Mayow’s five tracts: Opera omina medico-physica (The Hague, 1681).

42. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), the German physician, naturalist and physiologist based in Göttingen.

43. [Beddoes’s note: Blumenbach Instit. Physiologicæ, P: 114. Goettinga, 1787.] Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Institutiones Physiologicæ (Göttingen, 1787). Blumenbach cites Mayow, De sal nitro, et Spiritu nitro-aereo (1674). Translation: ‘A large part of these remarkable phenomena’, says he speaking of respiration, ‘by which in the last five years both the scientific study of factitious air and the physiology of the business of respiration are so greatly enriched and illustrated, was already known to that most intelligent doctor John Mayow a hundred years ago, whose tract, De Sal-nitro et Spiritu nitro Aerea, Oxford 1674, 8vo, (in which he certainly distinguished dephlogisticated air by name) should be read and reread with great delight’.

44. Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, First Viscount St Alban (1561-1626), who proposed the new scientific method based on inductive reasoning.

45. ‘holy mother of all that grows, / mother of men’ (Virgil, Georgics, trans. Peter Fallon (Oxford, 2009), Book II, lines 173-74).