"Without such a theory," says Sir Henry Roscoe, "modern chemistry would be a chaos; with it, order reigns supreme, and every apparently contradictory discovery only marks out more distinctly the value and importance of Dalton's work." In 1826 Sir Humphry Davy recognized Dalton's services to science in the following terms: "Finding that in certain compounds of gaseous bodies the same elements always combined in the same proportions, and that when there was more than one combination the quantity of the elements always had a constant relation,--such as 1 to 2, or 1 to 3, or 1 to 4,--he explained this fact on the Newtonian doctrine of indivisible atoms; and contended that, the relative weight of one atom to that of any other atom being known, its proportions or weight in all its combinations might be ascertained, thus making the statics of chemistry depend upon simple questions in subtraction or multiplication and enabling the student to deduce an immense number of facts from a few well-authenticated experimental results. Mr. Dalton's permanent reputation will rest upon his having discovered a simple principle universally applicable to the facts of chemistry, in fixing the proportions in which bodies combine, and thus laying the foundation for future labors respecting the sublime and transcendental parts of the science of corpuscular motion. His merits in this respect resemble those of Kepler in astronomy." In 1808 Dalton's atomic theory received striking confirmation through the investigations of the French scientist Gay-Lussac, who showed that gases, under similar circumstances of temperature and pressure, always combine in simple proportions by _volume_ when they act on one another, and that when the result of the union is a gas, its volume also is in a simple ratio to the volumes of its components. One of Dalton's friends summed up the result of Gay-Lussac's research in this simple fashion: "His paper is on the combination of gases. He finds that all unite in equal bulks, or two bulks of one to one of another, or three bulks of one to one of another." When Dalton had investigated the relative weights with which elements combine, he had found no simple arithmetical relationship between atomic weight and atomic weight. When two or more compounds of the same elements are formed, Dalton found, however, as we have seen, that the proportion of the element added to form the second or third compound is a multiple by weight of the first quantity. Gay-Lussac now showed that gases, "in whatever proportions they may combine, always give rise to compounds whose elements by volume are multiples of each other."