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He raves about Ossian, gazes for hours on the Maison Carrée at Nismes, writes letters to Paine on arcs and catenaries, busies himself with vocabularies, natural history, geology, discourses magisterially about Newton and Lavoisier, and studies nothing thoroughly. One can see by the way in which he handles his technical terms that he does not know the use of them.
One hundred years after La Salle completed the waterway journey to the gulf through that valley, Lavoisier made a discovery of the composition of water itself that has been of immense benefit, I am told, to the farmer of that valley and of other valleys. And then came Berthelot with his teaching of how to put together again, to synthetize, what man has waste-fully dissipated.
What are the causes of such a dissimilarity of product? We must seek for them. 1st. In the difference of the strength of the vinous liquor. Lavoisier employed only 4 parts of water to 1 part of dry sugar. The rum distiller usually puts 10 gallons of molasses to 90 gallons of water, or the residue of the preceding distillations. 10 galls. molasses contain 80 lbs. of sweet matter.
When I ordered Mulquinier to bring the sugar in pieces, the captain gave a start of surprise. 'Have you studied chemistry? he asked. 'With Lavoisier, I answered.
By M. Lavoisier. Translated by Robert Kerr. Thus Lavoisier thought he had demonstrated that the carbonic acid and the alcohol which are produced by the process of fermentation, are equal in weight to the sugar which disappears; but the application of the more refined methods of modern chemistry to the investigation of the products of fermentation by Pasteur, in 1860, proved that this is not exactly true, and that there is a deficit of from 5 to 7 per cent. of the sugar which is not covered by the alcohol and carbonic acid evolved.
This experiment proved that the calcination of mercury in the air consists in the combination of a constituent of the air with the mercury. Mayow's supposition was confirmed. Lavoisier made many more experiments on combustion, and proved that in every case the component of the atmosphere which he had named oxygen combined with the substance, or with some part of the substance, which was burned.
To one of these chemists, Djafar, our attention may for a moment be drawn. He lived toward the end of the eighth century, and is honoured by Rhazes, Avicenna, and Kalid, the great Arabic physicians, as their master. His name is memorable in chemistry, since it marks an epoch in that science of equal importance to that of Priestley and Lavoisier.
Those suspicions were confirmed by experiments on the calcination of metals and other substances, conducted in the 17th century by Jean Rey a French physician, and by John Mayow of Oxford. But these observations and the conclusions founded on them, did not bear much fruit until the time of Lavoisier, that is, towards the close of the 18th century.
Or it may be, that, without the formation of any such special substance, the physical condition of the living tissue of the yeast plant is sufficient to effect that small disturbance of the equilibrium of the particles of the sugar, which Lavoisier thought sufficient to effect its decomposition.
But then this name of anything very fine and very subtle came to be specially connected with the fine and subtle spirit obtained from the fermentation of sugar; and I believe that the first person who fairly fixed it as the proper name of what we now commonly call spirits of wine, was the great French chemist Lavoisier, so comparatively recent is the use of the word alcohol in this specialised sense.
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