Nothing can exhibit in a more striking point of view, the almost despotic power of fashion and authority over the minds even of men of science, and the small number of them that venture to think for themselves, than the fact, that this most important and luminous explanation of Wenzel, confirmed by much more accurate experiments than any which chemistry had yet seen, is scarcely noticed by any of his contemporaries, and seems not to have attracted the smallest attention. In science, it is as unfortunate for a man to get before the age in which he lives, as to continue behind it. The admirable explanation of combustion by Hooke, and the important experiments on combustion and respiration by Mayow, were lost upon their contemporaries, and procured them little or no reputation whatever; while the same theory, and the same experiments, advanced by Lavoisier and Priestley, a century later, when the minds of men of science were prepared to receive them, raised them to the very first rank among philosophers, and produced a revolution in chemistry. So much concern has fortune, not merely in the success of kings and conquerors, but in the reputation acquired by men of science. In the year 1792 another labourer, in the same department of chemistry, appeared: this was Jeremiah Benjamin Richter, a Prussian chemist, of whose history I know nothing more than that his publications were printed and published in Breslau, from which I infer that he was a native of, or at least resided in, Silesia. He calls himself Assessor of the Royal Prussian Mines and Smeltinghouses, and Arcanist of the Commission of Berlin Porcelain Manufacture. He died in the prime of life, on the 4th of May, 1807. In the year 1792 he published a work entitled "Anfansgründe der Stochyometrie; oder, Messkunst Chymischer Elemente" (Elements of Stochiometry; or, the Mathematics of the Chemical Elements). A second and third volume of this work appeared in 1793, and a fourth volume in 1794. The object of this book was a rigid analysis of the different salts, founded on the fact just mentioned, that when two salts decompose each other, the salts newly formed are neutral as well as those which have been decomposed. He took up the subject nearly in the same way as Wenzel had done, but carried the subject much further; and endeavoured to determine the capacity of saturation of each acid and base, and to attach numbers to each, indicating the weights which mutually saturate each other. He gave the whole subject a mathematical dress, and endeavoured to show that the same relation existed, between the numbers representing the capacity of saturation of these bodies, as does between certain classes of figurate numbers. When we strip the subject of the mystical form under which he presented it, the labours of Richter may be exhibited under the two following tables, which represent the capacity of saturation of the acids and bases, according to his experiments. 1. ACIDS.