BAUMÉ, ANTOINE, a Parisian apothecary, distinguished by his knowledge of chemistry, and by his practical application of that knowledge, was born at Senlis in 1728. He was the son of an innkeeper, and was put as apprentice to the eminent chemist Geoffroy. He had to contend with the disadvantages of a defective education; yet he nevertheless prosecuted his scientific researches with great success. In 1752 he was admitted a member of the College of Pharmacy; soon after he was appointed professor of chemistry at that establishment; and in his lectures he displayed the excellent arrangement which is seen in his published works. He carried to a great extent his commercial establishment in Paris for the preparation of drugs for medicine and the arts, such as the acetate of lead, the muriate of tin, mercurial salts, and antimonial preparations. At the same time he published a number of papers on chemical science, and on arts and manufactures. He established the first manufactory of sal-ammoniac in France, a substance which before that time had been obtained from Egypt. He was the first also who devised and set on foot a process for bleaching raw silk. Having acquired a competency by the success of these different undertakings, he retired from trade, and devoted his time to the application of chemistry to the arts. He improved the process for dyeing scarlet at the manufactory of the Gobelins, and published a cheap process for purifying saltpetre. By the revolution he lost his fortune, but this calamity, instead of disheartening him, stimulated him to resume his trade. He was chosen a correspondent of the Institute in 1796, and died in 1804, at the age of seventy-six. He was temperate, active, and regular in his habits. Many of his papers are published in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences. Of his separate publications, the following may be mentioned here: Dissertation sur l'Éther,
in 12mo; Plan d'un Cours de Chimie Expérimentale, 1757, in 12mo; Opuscules de Chimie, 1798, in 8vo; Éléments de Pharmacie Théorique et Pratique, 2 vols. 8vo; Chimie Expérimentale et Raisonnée, 3 vols. 8vo, 1773.