![]() Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged." Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. "We think only through the medium of words. While engaged in this employment, I perceived, better than I had ever done before, the justice of the following maxims of the Abbé de Condillac, in his System of Logic, and some other of his works. When I began the following Work, my only object was to extend and explain more fully the Memoir which I read at the public meeting of the Academy of Science in the month of April 1787, on the necessity of reforming and completing the Nomenclature of Chemistry. Translation by Robert Kerr (Edinburgh, 1790), pp. Even his comments about the pedagogy of introductory chemistry take sides in a debate that remains current.Īntoine Lavoisier, Preface to Elements of Chemistry In addition, Lavoisier's musings on the connection between science and the language which conveys its ideas remain thought-provoking, particularly in light of the writings of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alfred Ayer in the first half of the 20 th century. The preface to his Traité Élementaire de Chimie is a fitting selection to follow Boyle's The Sceptical Chymist because it includes the definition of element that was to dominate chemistry throughout the next century, and which is still familiar in our own day. A Parisian by birth, Lavoisier also died in Paris, guillotined with other former members of the Ferme Générale during the Reign of Terror in May 1794. He was an alternate deputy of the reconvened Estates-General in 1789, and from 1790 served on a commission charged with making weights and measures uniform across France. His service to France continued during the Revolution. His work for the government included advocating rational agricultural methods and improving the manufacture of gunpowder. Under the French monarchy, he was a member of the tax-collecting agency, the Ferme Générale. Lavoisier was a public servant as well as a scientist. ![]() ![]() His Traité Élementaire de Chimie (1789), from which the present extract is taken in a contemporary translation, was a tremendously influential synthesis of his work. ![]() Lavoisier by Jacque-Louis David at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) Among his important contributions were the application of the balance and the principle of conservation of mass to chemistry, the explanation of combustion and respiration in terms of combination with oxygen rather than loss of phlogiston (See chapter 5.), and a reform of chemical nomenclature. Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry Elements and Atoms: Chapter 3Īntoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) has been called the founder of modern chemistry.
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