These paintings represent a high point in scientific enquiry that began to undermine the power of religion in Western societies. Some ten years later, scientists would find themselves persecuted in the backlash to the French Revolution of 1789. Joseph Priestley, a member of the Lunar Society, left Britain in 1794 after his Birmingham laboratory was smashed and his house burned down by a mob objecting to his outspoken support for the French Revolution. In France, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier was executed by the guillotine at the height of the Terror. The politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, in his famous "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790), tied natural philosophers, and specifically Priestley, to the French Revolution; he later wrote in his "Letter to a Noble Lord" (1796) that radicals who supported science in Britain "considered man in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump". In light of this comment, Wright's painting of the bird in the air pump, completed more than twenty years earlier, seems particularly prescient.