en cast, and to America he sailed on April 8, 1794, in
the good ship _Sansom_, Capt. Smith, with a hundred others--his fellow
passengers. Whilst on the seas his great protagonist Lavoisier met his
death on 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,
wh