Quotes:Scheele, Karl Wilhelm

Zirkoff, Boris

Scheele, Karl Wilhelm. Swedish chemist, b. at Stralsund, Dec. 19, 1742; d. May 19, 1786. Studied the elements of chemistry during his apprenticeship to an apothecary in Gothenburg. Settled, 1770, at Upsala, where he became a close friend of Bergman. After being elected to the Stockholm Academy of Sciences in 1775, he moved to Kôping, where he became proprietor of a pharmacy. Although he died young, he found time for an enormous amount of original research, and his record as a discoverer of new substances is probably unequalled, especially when considering his poverty and lack of ordinary laboratory conveniences. There is little doubt that he isolated oxygen some two years before Priestley. He held to the idea of phlogiston and most likely identified it with hydrogen which he had obtained by the action of certain acids on iron or zinc. His only book, entitled Air and Fire was publ. in 1777 (Engl. tr. ed. by J. R. Forster, 1780) ; his numerous scientific papers have been publ. in several collections.

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 4, p. 664