Meres, Francis

See Francis King for a brief account of the Hydesville knockings. King emphasizes the importance of American spiritualists to the British occult revival, and sees them as in many ways merely the old cult of necromancy in a nineteenth-century guise (King 1970, 31). 

In particular experiments, there was a failure to develop a regular periodicity along c, or a less than sharp transition from monolayer to double layer of the intercalated substance, or a range in the difficulty of subsequent extraction of all of the intercalated material from a particular sample. Laboratory adsorption studies with mixed Na —Ca solutions (Glaeser and Mering, 1954 McAtee, 1956 Mungan and Jessen, 1963 Levy and Francis,... 

A Manual of Inorganic Chemistry, written by Francis H. Storer and Charles W. Eliot in the 1860s, was the first textbook of its kind to be published in English (Davis, 1929). The textbook was a standard reference for several decades, and in the preface the authors stated their underlying philosophy that the study of a science of observation ought to develop and discipline the observing faculties and that such a study fails of its true end if it becomes a mere exercise of the memory (as quoted in Davis, p. 876). This philosophy has been the cornerstone of the teaching of chemistry in the American and European university and secondary schools up to the present time. 

We may dismiss Francis Meres s extensive list of our best for tragedy in his Palladis Tamia of 1598 - the Lord Buckhurst, Dr Leg of Cambridge,... 

Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury being the Second Parte of Wits Common wealth (London, 1598), Z83, spelling modernised. 

Another group of experimentors tried to study the preferential utilisation of intact proteins or partial hydrolysates by means of the metabolic trap technique, which consists in measuring the effectiveness with which a labeled free amino acid can compete with larger protein fragments in the formation of new protein. The most positive evidence for the direct utilisation of such fn ments was generally found with embryonic and tumor tissues. Thus Ebert (343) found that when transplants of chick embryo kidney, liver, or spleen, labeled with S -methionine, were made into chick embryos, the radioactivity appeared predominantly in the correspondit organ, and that this transfer of radioactivity could not be inhibited by free methionine. Similarly, Francis and Winnick (344) found that the soluble proteins of a chick embryo extract were utilized in preference to free amino acids by embryonic heart cultures and that, furthermore, p-fluorophenyl-alanine did not inhibit the transfer of phenylalanine from the embryo extract proteins. These experiments, however, are open to many interpretations, especially since functional adoption (or merely adsorption) of the exogenous proteins by the different tissues has not been excluded. 

To return to Thomsen, in a memoir of 1894 published by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, he offered a detailed examination of the atomic weights and their significance. His purpose was to establish that they, if only properly interpreted, revealed that the so-called atoms of our elements have evolved out of combination of particles of a common basic substance. He did not on this occasion discuss the relation to the periodic system, but this is what he did the following year, in a paper in which he proposed a new classification of the elements (Figure 8.1). From a formal point of view, Thomsen s innovation was merely to reverse periods and groups, which was not entirely original since versions of this kind had been proposed earlier, first by Thomas Bayley in 1882 and again by Carnelley in 1886. ° However, in 1894 Thomsen was unaware of these two systems, such as he stated in a letter to the American chemist Francis Venable (1856-1934), who in a book of 1896 described Thomsen s system in some detail. ... 

---