Scharenberg at Stockholm. His next move was to Upsala with a Mr. Lokk, who appreciated his assistant and gave him plenty of time for his scientific work.
Lastly, he took the management of a pharmacy at Köping for a widow who owned it, and after an anxious time in clearing the business from debt, he bought the business in 1776 and for the rest of his short life was in fairly comfortable circumstances. Ill-health then pursued him, rheumatism and attacks of melancholy. In the spring of 1786, in the forty-fourth year of his age, after suffering for two months from a slow fever, he died. Two days before his death he married the widow of his predecessor, whose business he had rescued from ruin, so that she might repossess it. A few months later she married again.
That was Scheele's life as a pharmacist; patient, plodding, conscientious, only moderately successful, and shadowed by many disappointments. The work he accomplished as a scientific chemist would have been marvellous if he had had all his time to do it in; under the actual circumstances in which it was performed it is simply incomprehensible. A bare catalogue of his achievements is all that can be noted here, but it must be remembered that he never announced any discovery until he had checked his first conclusions by repeated and varied tests.
An account of an investigation of cream of tartar resulting in the isolation of tartaric acid was his first published paper. He next made an examination of fluor spar from which resulted the separation of fluoric acid. From this on the suggestion of Bergmann he proceeded to a series of experiments on black oxide of manganese which besides showing the many important combinations of the metal led the chemist direct to his
