Scientific Researches! — New Discoveries in Pneumaticks! — or — an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air

Gillray's hand-coloured etching lampoons a Royal Institution pneumatics demonstration, almost certainly referencing Humphry Davy's celebrated nitrous oxide experiments. At center, a lecturer directs a gas bladder at a stooped gentleman whose backside erupts in a visible blast; the fashionable audience — women in towering bonnets, red-faced men of property — reacts with exaggerated horror and hilarity. Class is the second target: the well-heeled pretend to pursue science while behaving no better than a tavern crowd. The caricature's dense cross-hatching, acid colour washes, and grotesquely distorted faces place it squarely in the Hogarthian satirical print tradition that ran through Rowlandson and later Daumier — a lineage art historians trace directly to the sequential comic panel and, eventually, the comic book page.