Note 10 — MEMOIRS OF Dr. JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. [WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.]
Reading edition
Dr. TURNER was a Physician at Liverpool: among his friends a professed Atheist. It was Dr. Turner who wrote the reply to Dr. Priestley’s letters to a philosophical unbeliever under the feigned name of Hammon. He was in his day a good practical chemist. I believe it was Dr. Turner who first invented, or at least brought to tolerable perfection, the art of copying prints upon glass, by striking off impressions with a coloured solution of silver and fixing them on the glass by baking on an iron plate in a heat sufficient to incorporate the solution with the glass. Some of them are very neatly performed, producing transparent copies in a bright yellow upon the clear glass.
Dr. Turner was not merely a whig but a republican. In a friendly debating society at Liverpool about the close of the American war, he observed in reply to a speaker who had been descanting on the honour Great Britain had gained during the reign of his present Majesty, that it was true, we had lost the Terra firma of the thirteen colonies in America, but we ought to be satisfied with having gained in return, by the generalship of Dr. Herschel, a terra incognita of much greater extent in nubibus.
T. C.