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Updated: June 16, 2025
Nor did they yield their theory when Lavoisier claimed to disprove it by burning phosphorus in oxygen and weighing the result, which was heavier than the phosphorus had been. Thereupon the world derided the alchemists and lauded Lavoisier whose experiments laid the foundation for the intricate science of modern chemistry.
Buffon was still alive, and the great sailors were every day enriching with their discoveries the Jardin du Roi; the physicists and the chemists, in the wake of Lavoisier, were giving to science a language intelligible to common folks; the jurisconsults were attempting to reform the rigors of criminal legislation at the same time with the abuses they had entailed, and Beaumarchais was bringing on the boards his Manage de Figaro.
Lavoisier had thrown off all the trammels which hindered the alchemists from making rigorous experimental investigations.
Sir Humphrey Davy demonstrates that gas not to be, as Lavoisier supposed, caloric, but light, combined with oxygen; and he suggests, not indeed that it is the vital principle itself, but the pabulum of life to organic beings." "Does he?" said Margrave, his, face clearing up. "Possibly, possibly, then, here we approach the great secret of secrets.
Lavoisier, in examining this process of restoration, found that there was always evolved a great quantity of "air," which he supposed to be "fixed air" or carbonic acid the same that escapes in effervescence of alkalies and calcareous earths, and in the fermentation of liquors. He then examined the process of calcination, whereby the phlogiston of the metal was supposed to have been drawn off.
After giving the details of his analysis of sugar and of the products of fermentation, Lavoisier continues:
But some of the material which was removed from the vessel might have remained dissolved in the water: Lavoisier distilled the water, which he had separated from the solid, in a glass vessel, until only a very little remained in the distilling apparatus; he poured this small quantity into a glass basin, and boiled until the whole of the water had disappeared as steam.
As one of the Commissioners for fixing the standard of weights and measures, great hopes were entertained that he might be restored to liberty. Measures were taken with that intention; but these were not suited to the spirit of the moment. The commission was dissolved, and LAVOISIER left in prison. Shortly after, this ever to be lamented savant was taken to the scaffold.
While endeavoring to account satisfactorily for combustion, which before his time people explained any way they could, Lavoisier succeeded in separating our two friends, the neighbors in the atmosphere, one from the other, and was the first man in the world who managed to secure in two bottles on the one hand, the bubbling oxygen freed from his tiresome mentor; on the other, the sober *azote, snatched away from his giddy pupil.
But there are others which are more simply explained by the first, and perhaps they both operate at once." Most of the physicists of that period, however, did not share the prudent doubts of Lavoisier and Laplace.
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