Richard Kirwan

Richard Kirwan (1733 to 1812) was an Irish chemist and geologist, born at Cregg Castle in County Galway. After a short Jesuit novitiate and a legal career at the Irish Bar, he gave up practice in 1768 for science and lived chiefly in London for nineteen years, corresponding with leading chemists on the continent. His experiments on the specific gravities and attractive powers of saline substances contributed to analytical chemistry and won him the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1782, two years after his election as a fellow. In 1787 he moved to Dublin, and from 1799 until his death he was president of the Royal Irish Academy, to whose proceedings he contributed some thirty-eight memoirs on meteorology, chemistry, geology, magnetism and philology. He was one of the last supporters in Britain and Ireland of the phlogiston theory, defending it in his Essay on Phlogiston and the Constitution of Acids of 1787 against Lavoisier and his associates until he conceded in 1791. His Elements of Mineralogy appeared in 1784.