James Keill, whom we have mentioned as an anatomist, translated Lemery's. Course of Chemistry in 1698, thereby introducing English chemists to the current theory of the relations of acids and alkalis. But ten years before that time, J. J. Beecher of Mentz had died, and G. E. Stahl was following out his observations, which had already borne fruit in his Zymotechnia Fundamentalis, with an ‘experimentum novum sulphur verum arte producendi’ (1697), which resulted in the enuntiation of the theory of phlogiston, the terminology of which was retained or adapted even by our Cavendish and Priestley in England in the latter hah0 of the succeeding century, when they had passed to more positive observations and discoveries of the composition of water, and oxygen gas.

Long before a chair of Chemistry was endowed at Cambridge, we have Barrow's testimony to the ardour with which the study was pursued.