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Updated: June 16, 2025
Finding that very many of the products of these combustions had the properties of acids, he gave to the new "air" the name oxygen, which means the acid-producer. At a later time, Lavoisier devised and conducted an experiment which laid bare the change of composition that happens when mercury is calcined in the air.
Stahl was the last of these, and Lavoisier the first of the new school in that which I have stated is the highest development of modern science, chemistry. In all these departments we have no adequate reason to assert that we are not ourselves mere students. The old lands of sameness and slumber have kept their secrets.
But we must not overlook the new and growing power of science; and science can no more make terms with Catholic ecclesiasticism than with the Revolution. The Jacobins guillotined Lavoisier, 'having no need of chemists'; but the Church burnt Bruno and imprisoned Galileo.
And then came that great chemist Lavoisier, and he examined into the subject carefully, and possessed with that brilliant thought of his which happens to be propounded exactly apropos to this matter of fermentation that no matter is ever lost, but that matter only changes its form and changes its combinations he endeavoured to make out what became of the sugar which was subjected to fermentation.
The people were to send him to the scaffold. The ladies of fashion crowded to the brilliant lectures of Fourcroy. The princes of pure science, M. de Lagrange, M. de Laplace, M. Monge, did not disdain to wrench themselves from their learned calculations in order to second the useful labors of Lavoisier.
Lavoisier concluded that to calcine tin is to cause it to combine with a portion of the air wherein it is calcined. The weighings he made showed that about one-fifth of the whole weight of air in the closed flask wherein he calcined tin had disappeared during the operation.
His devotion to science is well known, and he ranks with Lavoisier as an original discoverer of oxygen. He was an indefatigable student, a voluminous writer, a ready controversialist; and though his speaking was marred by imperfect utterance he attained to considerable influence in public address.
When the strange little man had ceased speaking the ladies too were silent; Monsieur Bodard was sound asleep; the surgeon, half drunk; Monsieur de Calonne was smiling at the lady next him. Lavoisier, Beaumarchais, and I alone had listened to the lawyer's dream. The silence at this moment had something solemn about it. The gleam of the candles seemed to me magical.
Lavoisier, and those who followed in his footsteps, also did away with the alchemical notion of the existence of an essential substratum, independent of changes in those properties of a substance which can be observed by the senses.
Lavoisier investigated the composition of the atmosphere and of water, and studied the many wonderful offices performed by an element common to both in the scheme of nature, namely, oxygen: and he discovered many of the properties of this elementary gas. After his time, the principal problem of chemical philosophers was to determine the composition of the solid matters composing the earth.
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