After this _apologia_, Priestley gives the reins to his imagination, or rather he allows phlogiston to drive the halting, ambling thing for him, with the result that he utterly loses his way and is eventually landed into an impassable quagmire. It is not too much to say that not one of the “Queries, Speculations and Hints” with which the volume closes has stood the test of time. The second volume, which made its appearance towards the end of 1775, is dedicated to Sir John Pringle, at that time President of the Royal Society. It opens, as usual, with a somewhat prolix but characteristic preface. But to his biographer Priestley’s prefaces are not the least interesting or valuable of his literary productions. “In a preface,” he says, “authors have always claimed a right of saying whatever they pleased concerning themselves, and not to lose this right it must now and then be exercised.” In this respect Priestley has championed the prerogatives of authors for all time. This particular preface begins with an expression of self-laudation for the little delay the writer made in putting the first volume to the press. “In consequence of this considerable discoveries have been made by people of distant nations; and this branch of science, of which nothing, in a manner, was known till very lately, indeed now bids fair to be farther advanced than any other in the whole compass of natural philosophy.... And it will not now be thought very assuming to say that by working in a tub of water or a basin of quicksilver we may perhaps discover principles of more extensive influence than even that of _gravity_ itself, the discovery of which, in its full extent, contributed so much to immortalise the name of Newton. “Having been the means of bringing so many champions into the field, I shall, with peculiar pleasure, attend to all their achievements, in order to prepare myself, as I promised in the preface to my last volume, for writing the _history_ of the campaign.” After a delightfully _naïve_ compliment to his own ability as an accumulator of facts, and to his merits as an “instrument in the hands of Divine Providence ... concerning which I threw out some further hints in my former preface, which the excellent French translator was not permitted to insert in his version,” he advances this testimony to his impartiality as an historian:—