Guillaume François Rouelle (born near Caen, 1703, died 1770) was in youth an enthusiastic student of chemistry, the rudiments of which he taught himself in the village smithy. Going to Paris he obtained a situation in the pharmacy which had been Lemery’s, and subsequently established one of his own in the Rue Jacob. There he commenced courses of private lectures which were characterised by such intimate knowledge, and flavoured with such earnestness and, as appears from the stories given by pupils, by a good deal of eccentricity, that they became the popular resort of chemical students. Lavoisier is believed to have attended them. Commencing his lectures in full professional costume, he would soon become animated and absorbed in his subject, and throwing off his gown, cap, wig and cravat, delighted his hearers with his vigour. Rouelle was offered the position of apothecary to the king, but declined the honour as it would have involved the abandonment of his lectures. His chief published work was the classification of salts into neutral, acid, and basic. He also closely investigated medicinal plants, and got so near to the discovery of alkaloids as the separation of what he called the immediate principles, making a number of vegetable extracts. Etienne François Geoffrey (born 1672, died 1731), the son of a Paris apothecary, himself of high reputation, for it was at his house that the first meetings were held which resulted in the formation of the Academy of Sciences, studied pharmacy at Montpellier, and qualified there. Returning to Paris he went through the medical course and submitted for his doctorate three theses which show the bent of his mind. The first examined whether all diseases have one origin and can be cured by one remedy, the second aimed to prove that the philosophic physician must also be an operative chemist, and the third dealt with the inquiry whether man had developed from a worm. Geoffrey was attached as physician to the English embassy for some time and was elected to the Royal Society of London. Afterwards he became professor of medicine and pharmacy at the College of France. His chief works were pharmacological researches on iron, on vitriol, on fermentation, and on some mineral waters. He wrote a notable treatise on Materia Medica. Albert Seba was an apothecary of Amsterdam, who spent some part of his early life in the Dutch Indies. He was born in 1668 and died in 1736. He was particularly noted for a great collection illustrating all the branches of natural history, finer than any other then known in Europe. Peter the Great having seen this collection bought it for a large sum and presented it to the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, where it is still preserved.