oseph Black was born on 16 April 1728 in Bordeaux where his father, a Belfast man of Scots descent, was in the wine trade. He was educated by his Scottish mother, who taught him English, until the age of twelve when he attended school in Belfast. In 1744 he entered the University of Glasgow where after attending the general curriculum for three years he decided to study medicine and hence attended the chemistry lectures of William Cullen. Chemistry captivated him, his interest being warmly encouraged by Cullen, and for three years he served as Cullen's assistant. In 1752 he went to the University of Edinburgh to complete his medical studies and graduated M.D. in 1754. In 1755 he read to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh a classic paper, published in 1756, describing chemical experiments many of which had been incorporated in his graduation thesis. This paper, which shows Black as an outstanding scientist, demonstrated quantitatively that a gas which he called "fixed air" (carbon dioxide) was a constituent of alkaline solids such as basic magnesium carbonate; as important as his results was Black's pioneering quantitative approach to chemical experimentation. The work was a foundation stone of the impending revolution in chemistry as acknowledged by the great chemist Lavoisier who in 1789 wrote to Black as "One of the most zealous admirers of the depth of your genius and of the important revolutions which your discoveries have caused in the Sciences".