“I wish M. Berthollet and his associates would relate their facts in plain prose, that all men might understand them, and reserve their poetry of the new nomenclature for their theoretical commentaries on the facts. “I have wished much to call on you to hear of the progress of your experiments, but have been much indisposed with the rheumatism. I long to know what acids you get with the other inflammable airs. If you get different acids from the inflammable air made from sulphur and water, that made from marine acid and copper (for I would avoid iron on account of its plumbago and carbon), and that made from charcoal and water:—I say, if these acids are different (suppose, according to my notions, vitriolic, marine and fixed air), then will you not be obliged to admit that there is not one inflammable but many inflammables, which opinion you now think as heterodox as the Athanasian System. “However, there are wonderful resources in the dispute about Phlogiston, by which either party can evade, so that I am less sanguine than you are in my hopes of seeing it terminated. One consolation remains, that in your experiments you cannot fail of discovering something perhaps of as great or greater importance for us to know.” Nevertheless, even in the Club itself there was at least one man who came under the influence of Priestley, but who eventually emancipated himself, and this was Withering, who, we are informed, read to them “a humorous piece in verse entitled ‘The Life and Death of Phlogiston,’ which was long remembered for its clever treatment and pointed wit.” That Priestley’s influence still reigned in the Club, even down to 1803, may be inferred from the introduction to his essay, “The Doctrine of Phlogiston Established”—the last of his scientific papers—in which he says, “And now that Dr Crawford is dead, I hardly know of any person, except my friends of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, who adhere to the doctrine of Phlogiston.” As regards the history of the Lunar Society there is little more to tell. One by one its members submitted themselves to the arrest of the “fell sergeant,” and eventually Keir, Watt, and Boulton, the founder, were the only survivors, and its meetings were gradually discontinued. “But,” says its historian, “the influence exerted by the Society did not die; it had stimulated inquiry and quickened the zeal for knowledge of all who had come within its influence, and this spirit diffused and propagated itself in all directions.” Leonard Horner, who visited Soho in 1809, thus refers to the continued moral influence of the association:—