He was educated at Frome grammar school, and was intended for the civil service in India, but the death of his patron, William Huskisson, caused a change in his career, and he commenced the study of chemistry and electricity.

While with Hofmann he made researches on the oxidation of cymol or cymene, the hydro-carbon which Gerhardt and Cahours discovered in 1840 in the volatile oil of Roman cumin.

The results were in part communicated to the Chemical Society[2] at the time, and more fully afterwards to the Philosophical Magazine, 1848, xxxii.

In 1847 he was appointed to the chair of chemistry in the medical school of St George's Hospital, which he held till his death.

About 1849 he obtained the degree of doctor of physics from the university of Giessen, and in 1850–1 conducted, conjointly with Henry Gray, an inquiry into the composition and functions of the spleen.

In 1848 he wrote a valuable treatise on Chemical Manipulation and Analysis, Qualitative and Quantitative, for the Library of Useful Knowledge, and re-wrote in 1875 A Normandy's Commercial Handbook of Chemical Analysis, a volume which meets the wants of the analyst while discharging his duties under the Adulteration Act.

He also issued a revised and enlarged edition of Sir W. S. Harris's ‘Rudimentary Magnetism’ in 1872, and wrote many papers in scientific journals.