Abstract
RICHARD KIRWAN, the bicentenary of whose birth falls this year, was known to his generation as a man of great understanding and charm; he became known, indeed, as the ‘Nestor of English chemistry’. To succeeding generations, however, his exploits and his personality have not been fully revealed; for in spite of the high esteem in which he was held by his illustrious contemporaries, in spite of his numerous researches and his close association with learned societies, his career received little attention from the biographers of his time. In fact, no serious attempt was made to record even the salient features of his life until almost forty years after his death. By that time many details were probably beyond recall; even the exact date of his birth does not appear to have been published, though this omission is, perhaps, not surprising in view of the haphazard manner in which births and deaths were registered in Ireland prior to the nineteenth century. Donovan omits the date from his biographical sketch, whilst Thomson, in his “History of the Royal Society” (1812), states that Kirwan was born on August 1, 1735. The destruction of the Record Office in Dublin in 1922, and also of other records, make it unlikely that we shall ever know more than the bare fact that he was born in 1733.
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BRINDLEY, W. Richard Kirwan, F.R.S., 1733–1812. Nature 132, 957–958 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132957a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132957a0