Priestley in America | Page 4

the scaffold.
Such was the treatment bestowed upon the best of their citizens by two nations which considered themselves as without exception the most civilized and enlightened in the world!
It is quite natural to query how the grand old scientist busied himself on this voyage of eight weeks and a day. The answer is found in his own words:
I read the whole of the Greek Testament, and the Hebrew bible as far as the first Book of Samuel: also Ovid's Metamorphoses, Buchanan's poems, Erasmus' Dialogues, also Peter Pindar's poems, &c.... and to amuse myself I tried the heat of the water at different depths, and made other observations, which suggest various experiments, which I shall prosecute whenever I get my apparatus at liberty.
The Doctor was quite sea-sick, and at times sad, but uplifted when his eyes beheld the proofs of friendship among those he was leaving behind. Thus he must have smiled benignantly on beholding the
elegant Silver Inkstand, with the following inscription, presented ... by three young Gentlemen of the University of Cambridge:
"To Joseph Priestley, LL.D. &c. on his departure into Exile, from a few members of the University of Cambridge, who regret that expression of their Esteem should be occasioned by the ingratitude of their Country."
And, surely, he must have taken renewed courage on perusing the valedictory message received from the Society of United Irishmen of Dublin:
Sir,
SUFFER a Society which has been caluminated as devoid of all sense of religion, law or morality, to sympathize with one whom calumny of a similar kind is about to drive from his native land, a land which he has adorned and enlightened in almost every branch of liberal literature, and of useful philosophy. The emigration of Dr. Priestley will form a striking historical fact, by which alone, future ages will learn to estimate truly the temper of the present time. Your departure will not only give evidence of the injury which philosophy and literature have received in your person, but will prove the accumulation of petty disquietudes, which has robbed your life of its zest and enjoyment, for, at your age no one would willingly embark on such a voyage, and sure we are, it was your wish and prayer to be buried in your native country, which contains the dust of your old friends Saville, Price, Jebb, and Fothergill. But be cheerful, dear Sir, you are going to a happier world--the world of Washington and Franklin.
In idea, we accompany you. We stand near you while you are setting sail. We watch your eyes that linger on the white cliffs and we hear the patriarchal blessing which your soul pours out on the land of your nativity, the aspiration that ascends to God for its peace, its freedom and its prosperity. Again, do we participate in your feelings on first beholding Nature in her noblest scenes and grandest features, on finding man busied in rendering himself worthy of Nature, but more than all, on contemplating with philosophic prescience the coming period when those vast inland seas shall be shadowed with sails, when the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, shall stretch forth their arms to embrace the continent in a great circle of interior navigation: when the Pacific Ocean shall pour into the Atlantic; when man will become more precious than fine gold, and when his ambition will be to subdue the elements, not to subjugate his fellow-creatures, to make fire, water, earth and air obey his bidding, but to leave the poor ethereal mind as the sole thing in Nature free and incoercible.
Happy indeed would it be were men in power to recollect this quality of the human mind. Suffer us to give them an example from a science of which you are a mighty master, that attempts to fix the element of mind only increase its activity, and that to calculate what may be from what has been is a very dangerous deceit.--Were all the saltpetre in India monopolized, this would only make chemical researches more ardent and successful. The chalky earths would be searched for it, and nitre beds would be made in every cellar and every stable. Did not that prove sufficient the genius of chemistry would find in a new salt a substitute for nitre or a power superior to it.[3] It requires greater genius than Mr. Pitt seems to possess, to know the wonderful resources of the mind, when patriotism animates philosophy, and all the arts and sciences are put under a state of requisition, when the attention of a whole scientific people is bent to multiplying the means and instruments of destruction and when philosophy rises in a mass to drive on the wedge of war. A black powder has changed the military art, and in a great degree the manners of mankind. Why may not the same