and only watching the experiments. Worse still, says Tuckwell, his scientific demonstrations ‘invariably went wrong’. Vernon Harcourt later recalled how, when one experiment failed to yield the result expected, he turned to his assistant, John Harris, and remarked: ‘John, when we tried this experiment before the lecture the results were so-and-so’. Harris assented, and Daubeny then turned to the audience: ‘You see, gentleman’. H.M. Vernon recounts another incident: Another story is told of an occasion when the Professor, holding up a vessel, thrilled his hearers by asserting that it contained a liquefied gas, and that, if he were to drop it, the gas would vaporize, and they would all be immediately suffocated. The next instant the vessel slipped and crashed to the ground, but – nothing happened. ‘John, why aren’t we all suffocated?’ demanded Daubeny, and John had to confess that before the lecture he had substituted distilled water for the dangerous gas. The numbers attending Daubeny’s lectures gradually declined. For the period 1822 to 1830 an average of 28 undergraduates were present for his chemistry lectures, with a peak of 44 in 1828. But thereafter a decline set it: for the years 1830 to 1838 the average was 14, and in 1838 fell to just 10, prompting him to cancel his lectures for the next year – understandably, as he personally paid the costs of the experiments. In 1837 he visited the United States and acquired there the materials for papers on the thermal springs and the geology of North America, read in 1838 before the Ashmolean Society and the British Association (and published in 1839). In 1856 he became president of the latter body at its meeting at Cheltenham. The herbarium at Oxford is named after him, as is the plant genus Daubenya. In 1860, Daubeny read a paper entitled Remarks on the Final Causes of the Sexuality of Plants at the Natural History Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford. The paper references the work of Charles Darwin. Daubeny has been described as an earlier supporter of natural selection. Works A Description of active and extinct volcanos (1826) Introduction to the Atomic Theory (1831); 2nd edition, 1850 On the Action of Light upon Plants, and of Plants upon the Atmosphere (1836) Sketch of the Geology of North America (1839) Lectures on Agriculture (1841) Journal of a tour through the United States, and