Samuel Parkes (chemist)

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Samuel Parkes (c. 1759–1825) was a British manufacturing chemist.

He published manuals of chemistry between 1806 and 1815.

His work of popular science, the Chemical Catechism, includes poetical descriptions of chemical processes. Here is his description of plant respiration:

Thus while the vegetable tribes inhale

The limpid water from the parent vale,

Their vegetating organs decompose

The salutary compound as it flows,

And, by affinities unknown disport

The subtle hydrogen, with chemic art

To blend it with the carbon of the soil,

And form bitumen, resin, wax, or oil:,

The free'd caloric bursts the expanding mass,

And swells the nascent oxygen to gas;

Which, from its inmost cells, each leaflet pours

In viral currents through its myriad pores,

To renovate the air, by tempests hurl'd

From pole to pole, around a freshen'd world.