Daguerre, in 1839, had just published the process of his wonderful art, and it constituted perhaps the greatest novelty in Paris at the time of the sojourn there of Doctor Bush and Doctor Peter; so along with the apparatus for Transylvania was brought to Lexington a daguerreotype outfit which surely must have been the first ever seen in that city, if not the first ever used in the West. This primitive camera and its accompaniments, which Doctor Peter showed to his classes many years after, can still be found, it is supposed, among the old Transylvania possessions preserved at the Kentucky University. On his return from Europe Doctor Peter engaged in much valuable chemical research for the benefit of medical science, notably his examinations of calculi, published in 1846.[68] He also, in 1846, experimented with the then newly discovered explosive, gun-cotton, and with pyroxyline made from paper and other materials. His chemical research and teachings all were now and invariably along practical lines. Leaving theory to others, his own endeavors were in anticipation of useful results in practice. Quick to adopt new views when properly sustained by facts, he was highly appreciative of improved methods, a trait strikingly displayed when, in his old age, the most radical changes revolutionized the methods of chemical work. Laying aside the long-familiar doctrines, practiced since his far-distant youth, he took up the new with an ease--even alacrity--hardly excelled by contemporary chemists of a younger generation. In his early days he experimented much with electricity--then little understood. He gave much attention to geology, mineralogy, zoology, and botany. Associated with Doctor Charles W. Short and Professor Henry A. Griswold, he made important botanical explorations.[69] His fine herbarium, including specimens exchanged for with leading European botanists, he gave in after years to the Kentucky State Agricultural and Mechanical College. Doctor Lewis Rogers, in his address as President to the Kentucky State Medical Society, 1878, says: "In the interesting departments of Botany and Chemistry, Doctor Charles Wilkins Short and Doctor Peter are known throughout the scientific world. As teachers, the modest, almost shrinking manner, the seemingly acerb dignity, and Addisonian style of the one and the lucid expositions and brilliant illustrations of the other, must be remembered by all who ever listened to them." In 1850-53, Doctor Peter filled with distinction the chair of Chemistry in the newly founded Kentucky School of Medicine at Louisville, since so successful. On October 19, 1853, at the third meeting of the Kentucky Medical Society at Lexington, he proposed to memorialize the legislature in regard to the establishment of a Geological Survey of Kentucky. Accordingly, he prepared such a memorial (in connection with his "Report on the Relation of Forms of Disease to the Geological