ho first discovered this simple oxide of carbon.

Priestley was a man of strong human sympathies. He loved to mingle with
men and exchange thoughts. Furthermore, Priestley was a minister--a
preacher. He was ordained while at Warrington, and gloried in the fact
that he was a Dissenting Minister. It was not his devotion to science
which sent him "into exile." His advanced thought along political and
religious lines, his unequivocal utterances on such subjects,--proved
to be the rock upon which he shipwrecked. It has been said--

By some strange irony of fate this man, who was by nature one of
the most peaceable and peace-loving of men, singularly calm and
dispassionate, not prone to disputation or given to wrangling,
acquired the reputation of being perhaps the most cantankerous man
of his time....

There is a wide-spread impression that Priestley was a chemist. This is
the answer which invariably comes from the lips of students upon being
interrogated concerning him. The truth is that Priestley's attention was
only turned to chemistry when in the thirties by Matthew Turner, who
lectured on this subject in the Warrington Academy in which Priestley
labored as a teacher. So he was rather advanced in life before the
science he enriched was revealed to him in the experimental way. Let it
again be declared, he was a teacher. His thoughts were mostly those of a
teacher. Education occupied him. He wrote upon it. The old Warrington
Academy was a "hot-bed of liberal dissent," and there were few subjects
upon which he did not publicly declare himself as a dissenter.

He learned to know our own delightful Franklin in one of his visits to
London. Franklin was then sixty years of age, while Priestley was little
more than half his age. A warm friendship immediately sprang up. It
reacted powerfully upon Priestley's work as "a political thinker and as
a natural philosopher." In short, Franklin "made Priestley into a man of
science." This intimacy between these remarkable men should not escape
American students. Recall that positively fascinating letter (1788) from
Franklin to Benjamin Vaughan, in which occur these words:

Remember me affectionately ... to the honest heretic Dr.
Priestley. I do not call him honest by way of distinction, for I
think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They
have the virtue of Fortitude, or they would not venture to own
their heres