Kindly, courteous, charitable; unaffected, and temperate in his manner of life, Boyle enjoyed the respect and esteem of all his contemporaries. It was said of him that he was never known to have offended any person in his whole life by any part of his deportment. He allowed himself a great deal of decent cheerfulness, and had about him all the tenderness of good nature, as well as all the softness of friendship. These gave him a large share of other men’s concerns, for he had a quick sense of the miseries of mankind. Although a philosopher in the broadest sense of that term, his peculiar and favourite study was chemistry, “in which,” says Bishop Burnet, “he engaged with none of those ravenous and ambitious designs that drew many into them. His design was only to find out nature, to see into what principles things might be resolved, and of what they were compounded.” =John Kunkel=, born in 1630, was the son of an alchemist attached to the Court of the Duke of Holstein. After serving his father for some years, he obtained employment as chemist and pharmacist under the Dukes Charles and Henry, of Lauenburg. He subsequently entered the laboratory at Dresden of John George II., Elector of Saxony, and, after teaching chemistry at the University of Wittenburg, then famous as a medical school, he accepted an invitation to take charge of the glass works and laboratory of the Elector of Brandenburg, at Berlin. The laboratory was burnt down, and then Charles XI. of Sweden called him to Stockholm and ennobled him as Baron von Lowenstiern. He died in Stockholm in 1702. Kunkel’s chief work is his _Laboratorium Chymicum_, published after his death. It was written in German. In it Kunkel relates how he acquired possession of a knowledge of the manufacture of Baldwin’s phosphorus, and of the phosphorus discovered by Brand—perhaps the most important, as it certainly was one of the most striking, of the chemical discoveries of the seventeenth century. Kunkel did much to liberate chemical literature from the mysticism and obscurity of alchemy. He was scornful of the theories of the adepts, and contemptuous of their _tria prima_. I, old man that I am, who have been occupied with chemistry for sixty years, have never yet been able to discover their fixed sulphur, or how it enters into the composition of metals.... Moreover, they are not agreed among themselves respecting the kind of sulphur. The sulphur of one is not the sulphur of the other. To that one may reply that each is at liberty to baptise his child as he likes. I agree: you may even, if you are so disposed, call an ass a cow; but you will never make anyone believe that your cow is an ass. As to the alkahest he says:—