Home, Everard

In the following year Sir Everard Home interested Mr. Hatchett in the chemical composition of dental enamel (7, 8). Since the tooth of the elephant is composed of three different structures, Sir Everard wished to know whether the materials themselves were different or only differently arranged. Hatchett showed that the enamel was composed of calcium phosphate. The enamel, said he, has been supposed not a phosphate but a carbonate of lime. This error may have arisen from its solubility in acetous acid or distilled vinegar but the effects of the acetous acid are in every respect the same on powdered bone as on the enamel (8). 

Home, Sir Everard, Some observations on the structure of the teeth of... 

John Winthrop the Younger (1606 to 1676) was fond of minerals and made a hobby of collecting them. In a spring near his home in New London, Connecticut, he found a black rock, now known as columbite. His grandson sent this to Sir Hans Sloane (1660 to 1753) in London, who handed it over to the British Museum. There it lay until 1801 when Charles Hatchett examined it. Hatchett was the son of a prosperous London coach-builder in Long Acre, a well-known mineralogist and chemist, and one of the Founders of the Animal Chemistry Club (1809) which met alternately at the houses of Sir Everard Home and of Hatchett himself. He was working on some chromium minerals in the British Museum and concluded that this black mineral contained a new element, which he called columbium the mineral in consequence was later called columbite, as mentioned above. It subsequently transpired, however, that the columbium was not a simple element, but a mixture of two. The discovery was made in this way. 

Sir Everard Home, Bart., F.R.S, Surgeon Extraordinary to H.M. the King, etc., etc., had published lectures he had given before 1811 that, he said, were based on the Huntarian Collection. Home wrote that he had found... 

---