He then goes on to say that the arguments in favour of this opinion, especially those which were drawn from the experiments of Lavoisier on mercury, were “so specious” that he owns he was much inclined to adopt it. But he was evidently loth to part company with a conception which had hitherto been the central idea of his chemical creed, the very key-stone of the structure which he was pleased to regard as his philosophy. As an abstract conception, as the principle of levity, as something which was the negation of mass and which gravity repelled, phlogiston was eminently unsatisfactory. But what if phlogiston were an entity? A ponderable substance, no matter how light? In that case Stahl’s generalisation might still afford salvation. “My friend, Mr Kirwan”—a clever, ingenious Irishman, with a nimble wit and a facile pen—supplied the hint—“Phlogiston was inflammable air”—and Priestley by a series of experiments, faultless as to execution but utterly fallacious as to interpretation, persuades himself that Kirwan is right and that Mr Lavoisier’s opinion and his “specious arguments” are therefore to be discountenanced. The paper, in certain respects, is one of the most noteworthy of Priestley’s productions. The experiments are original, ingenious and striking, but as an example of his inductive capacity, or as an indication of its author’s logical power, or of his ability to try judicially the very issue he has raised, it is significant only of the profound truth of his own words that “we may take a maxim so strongly for granted that the plainest evidence of sense will not entirely change, and often hardly modify, our persuasions; and the more ingenious a man is, the more effectually he is entangled in his errors, his ingenuity only helping him to deceive himself by evading the force of truth.” The next paper in the volume, on “The Seeming Conversion of Water into Air,” is a record of experiments which cost Priestley much labour and the Lunar Society, for a time, much mystification. Priestley eventually detected the fallacy in the observation which originally induced him to believe that it was possible to transmute water into a permanently elastic fluid, but he got no further in his explanation than that air has a faculty of passing through the pores of an earthern vessel “by means of a power very different from that of pressure.”