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HIS DISCOVERIES IN SCIENCE. 207
other may make all the existing varieties. This subject is mentioned in a work
on *
Chemical Philosophy,’ recently published in Paris, consisting of a course
of lectures delivered in the college of France by M. Dumas ; a gentleman of
much and deserved celebrity. There is a notice of this work in the forty-fifth
number of the Foreign Quarterly Review, pubhshed in London. M. Dumas dis-
tinctly ascribes to Svvedenborg the origin of the modern science of crystallogra-
phy. He says, ’ It is then to him we are indebted, for the first idea of making
cubes, tetraedes, pyramids, and the different crystalline forms, by grouping the
spheres ; and it is an idea which has since been renewed by several distinguished
men, Wollaston in particular.’ The r^iewer afterwards says, that -the systems
of Svvedenborg and Wollaston differ essentially, but he does not state wherein
the difference consists."
From the same work for December 1842, we extract the following ;
" Swederiborg the Inventor ofthe Air- Tight Stoves. —The air-tight stove, which has
come into very extensive use in this country within three or four years, was
patented, if we recollect right, by Dr. Orr of Washington City. The vahdity of
the patent has been recently tried in one of our courts of justice in this
city, and the case was dismissed on the ground that the specifications of the
patent was not sufficiently explicit. It appears by an article in the February
number of the Intellectual Repository, that the principle of this stove was dis-
covered and made known by Swedenborg more than a century ago. His
scientific treatise, describing the new invention of a stove, and other things, is
said to have gone through these editions. (The Repository goes at large into
the proof of Swedenborg’s claim and a detailed description of the stove, which
our limits compel us to omit.)"
The London New Church Quarterly Review, No. 1, (January, 1847) contains an
elaborate article on Swedenborg’s Principia, from which it would appear that, in the
writer’s estimation, the work falls little short of Newton’s Principia. The following is
mentioned as one of Swedenborg’s remarkable anticipations.
Swedenborg the Discoverer of the Identity of Electricity and Lightning.—’*One
striking and remarkable fact we are bound to notice—the identity of elec-
tricity and lightning. It was in June 1752, we believe, that Franklin’s cele-
brated experiment was performed, by which this identity was estabhshed. Yet
no less than 19 years previously, namely in 1733, Swedenborg’s Principia was
published, in which this same truth is reasoned out as a minor consequent to his
philosophy. Such are the coincidences which have never yet failed in us in any
attempted application of Swedenborg’s Philosophy, and which might surprise
even the skeptic into a belief of the brilliancy and originality of his genius.
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