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BAUME

Volume 4 · 502 words · 1842 Edition

ANTHONY, a druggist in Paris, 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 not received a regular school education; a defect that occasioned him many difficulties in prosecuting his scientific researches, which he nevertheless did with much ardour. In 1732 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 mixtures. At the same time he published papers on the crystallization of salts, on the phenomena of congelation, on those of fermentation, on the combinations and preparations of sulphur, opium, mercury, boric acid, platinum, and Peruvian bark, on the metallic oxides, the acetates of the alkaloids, emetic tartar, on vegetable fecula, and on vegetable extracts. In consequence of these scientific works, Baume was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. He wrote a great many articles in the Dictionnaire des Arts et Métiers, and had previously published several technological papers; namely, on dyeing, on the gilding of clockwork, on a method for extinguishing fires, on the mode of keeping corn, on buildings of plaster, on soap-making, on clay, and on the nature of soils fitted for agriculture. He made numerous experiments, along with Macquer, for the purpose of fabricating in France a porcelain equal to the Japanese. He established the first manufactory of salammoniac in France, a substance which before that time had been obtained from Egypt. He was the first 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. He bestowed much time in forming an arcometer intended for general use; and published a process for obtaining a mild fecula from the horse-chestnut. By the revolution he lost his fortune, but was not thereby disheartened; for this calamity led 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, regular in his habits, and active. Many of his papers are published in the Mémoires de l'Académie des Sciences. Of his separate publications, the following may be mentioned here: Dissertation sur l'Ether, 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.