he had collected in the course of his travels, among them the celebrated Clarke Codex of Plato's dialogues (895 CE), were sold to the Bodleian Library for £1000; and by the publication of his travels he realized altogether a clear profit of £6595. Besides lecturing on mineralogy and discharging his clerical duties, made several discoveries in chemistry, principally by means of the gas blow-pipe, which he had brought to a high degree of perfection. He was also appointed university librarian in 1817, and was one of the founders of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1819. He died in London on 9 March 1822. Greek artefacts In 1801, Clarke and his assistant John Marten Cripps, obtained an authorisation from the governor of Athens for the removal of a statue of the goddess Demeter at Eleusis, with the intervention of Italian artist Giovanni Battista Lusieri who was Elgin's assistant at the time. The statue had been discovered in 1676 by the traveller George Wheler, and several ambassadors had submitted unsuccessful applications for its removal. Clarke was the one to remove the statue by force, after bribing the waiwode of Athens and obtaining an edict, despite the objections of the local population who unofficially, and against the traditions of the iconoclastic Church, worshipped the statue as the uncanonised Saint Demetra (Greek: Αγία Δήμητρα). The people would adorn the statue with garlands, and believed that the goddess was able to bring fertility to their fields and that the removal of the statue would cause that benefit to disappear. Clarke also removed other marbles from Greece including a statue of Pan, a figure of Eros, a comic mask and various reliefs and funerary steles. Clarke donated these to the University of Cambridge and in 1803 the statue of Demeter was displayed at the university library. The collection was later moved to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where it formed one of the two main collections of the institution. Selected works Testimony of Authors respecting the Colossal Statue of Ceres in the Public Library, Cambridge (8vo, 1801–1803) The Tomb of Alexander, a Dissertation on the Sarcophagus brought from Alexandria, and now in the British Museum (4to, 1805) A Methodical Distribution of the Mineral Kingdom (fol., Lewes, 1807) A Description of the Greek Marbles brought from the Shores of the Euxine, Archipelago and Mediterranean, and deposited in the University Library, Cambridge (8vo, 1809) Travels in various Countries