Biography of Dr. Sheridan Muspratt ... / by a London barrister-at-law.

  • Muspratt Sheridan, 1821-1871.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Biography of Dr. Sheridan Muspratt ... / by a London barrister-at-law. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    distinguished for having overcome the ordinary difficulties that throng the path to celebrity. He has not issued into life through those pecuniary hardships which give strength to a good many superior minds, and ruin a great many more. But he has given, it may be, a better proof of ability, in undergoing the toil of an elaborate and abstruse science of whose material rewards he stood in no need. As a general rule the sons of affluent fathers have aspired to add to the insipidities of parliament, or to repose on the com- forts of a rich living, or more commonly to squander in idleness what their ancestors acquired for them with a severe industry. Any of these “time-honored” courses he too might have adopted. But there was something in him which the beaten track would not satisfy. His youth had caught glimpses of a bright and almost magic world which a few brave minds had partially explored, and it became the ambition of his life to go along with them, or surpass them, if it might be, in this part-discovered realm. At an age when others were only stripping for their work he was already gaining ground: not tempted to exertion by a hope of wealth, nor urged by the spur of adversity, but, obeying the impulse of a love for science, which worked by the force of its intensity. James Sheridan Muspratt is the son of Mr. James Muspratt, of Seaforth Hall, near Liverpool; well known for his success as a chemical manufacturer: a man of strong and original mind, and of an enterprising and liberal spirit. Of ten children the chemist is the eldest, and was born in Dublin on the 8th of March, 1821. His father’s subsequent removal to Liverpool, where he soon surprised that busy world by the magnitude and success of his chemical works, placed his early education in the hands, first of the Rev. Mr. Hind, of Winwick, Lancashire; and