For Its Hot as Hell... In Phila-del-phi

As already mentioned, the weather was almost unprecedentedly hot and his laboratory was in sundry places perpetually glowing with blazing charcoal, and red-hot furnaces, crucibles and gun-barrels, and often bathed in every portion of it with the steam of boiling water. Rarely, during the day, was the temperature of its atmosphere lower than from 110° to 115° of Fahrenheit— at times, perhaps, even higher. 

Almost daily did 1 visit the professor in that salamander s home, and uniformly found him in the same condition—stripped to his shirt and summer pantaloons, his collar unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, the sweat streaming copiously down his face and person, and his whole vesture 

My salutation to him on entering his semi-Phlegethon of heat not infrequently was Good God, doctor, how can you bear to remain so constantly in so hot a room It is a perfect purgatory To this half interrogatory, half exclamation, the reply received was usually to the same purport. Hot, sir— hot Do you call this a hot room Why, sir, it is one of the coolest rooms in Philadelphia. Exhalation, sir, is the most cooling process. And do you not see how the sweat exhales from my body, and carries off all the caloric Do you not know, sir, that, by exhalation, ice can be produced under the sun of the hottest climates  

It is less expensive. The lamp of Guyton, is one of the worst of the kind, for a Chemical Laboratory. There is no occasion for a number of screws, to elevate or depress the retort or lamp, for a great or low heat may be made, merely by raising or lowering the wick. 

FIGURE 240. Dr. James Woodhouse, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, founded the Chemical Society of Philadelphia. He also had a profitable lecture series for which he sold his own chemical apparatus. He proclaimed it to he far superior and more economical than that of Guyton de Morveau in France. (From Parkinson, The Chemical Pocket-Book, 1802.) 

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