The national importance of scientific research / by George Gore.

  • Gore, George, 1826-1909.
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The national importance of scientific research / by George Gore. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    NATIONAI. xIMPpSl^ANCE OP SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH BY GEORGE GORE, F.R.S. (Rexirinted from the “ Westminster Review,” for April 1873.^ Nearly all great modem scientific discoveries have been made by teachers of science and others, who spent a large portion of their lives in experimental investigation, searching for new truths, and not by persons who have hit upon them by accident. The greatest discoveries *lin physics and chemistry in modern times were made chiefly by such men as Newton, Cavendish, Scheele, Priestley, Oersted, Volta, Davy, and Faraday; all great workers in science. It is by observing matter and its forces under new conditions that many discoveries are made; thus Priestley placed some oxide of mercury in an inverted glass vessel, and heated it by means of a lens and the sun’s rays, and discovered Oxygen. Oxygen was nearly discovered by Eck de Sulsbach three hundred years before; he heated six pounds of an amalgam of silver and mercury, and converted the latter metal into a red oxide like cinnabar, and he remarked, “ a spirit is united with the metal, and what proves it is this, that this artificial cinnabar submitted to distillation, disengages that spirit.” The “ spirit” was evidently oxygen. Some kinds of discoveries are made by observing the phenomena of bodies placed under»special conditions by those operations of nature over which we have little or no control. All our knowledge of astronomy, and much of that of geology and physiology, was acquired in this way. In nearly all modern discoveries of importance, in physics or chemistry, long and difficult investigations had to be made in order to completely establish their truth. When Crookes discovered Thallium, he saw the first sign of its existence as a momentary flash of green light in a spec-