Joseph W. Mellor's bookplate

c. 1911

Mellor Papers, Box 11

Unpublished

It is not known whose initials, ‘G.M.F’, appear at the bottom of Mellor’s bookplate but it appears that it was drawn in 1911. The owl, a symbol of wisdom, sits atop a flask over a Bunsen burner which is surrounded by books. The Latin inscription, ‘Sapientia naturaeque instituta tunc solum vera quum rebus externis conveniunt’, loosely translates to ‘Knowledge and the laws of nature truly come together when they agree with experimentation.’ Mellor wrote, in the Introduction to his Modern Inorganic Chemistry (1912), ‘The chemist would not make much progress if it were only possible to observe phenomena just as they occur in nature…’ Mellor spent his life experimenting, from his tin shed in the garden of his parents’ Dunedin home to the laboratories of the North Staffordshire Technical College, Mellor knew chemistry was not possible without experimentation.