Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 16, 2025
On one of these commissions was Benjamin Franklin, then American Ambassador to France as well as the great French scientist Lavoisier. The other was drawn from the Royal Academy of Medicine, and included Laurent de Jussieu, the only man who declared in favor of Mesmer.
Nor did Franklin, Lavoisier, or Bailly believe in Mesmeric magnetism before they became members of the Government Commission, and yet we may have remarked with what minute and scrupulous care they varied the experiments. True philosophers ought to have constantly before their eyes those two beautiful lines:
Lavoisier, by heating mercury to a high temperature in a close vessel containing air, found that the mercury increased in weight, and became what was then called red precipitate, while the air, on being examined after the experiment, proved to have lost weight, and to have become incapable of supporting life or combustion.
Some two hundred and fifty students annually study this subject, but whether from apathy, indolence, the limited capacity of the Indian, or some other ethnological or incomprehensible reason, up to now there has not developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi, or a Tyndall, not even in miniature, in the Malay-Filipino race."
If there was no change in the total weight of the apparatus and its contents, and if air rushed in when the vessel was opened after the calcination, and the total weight was then greater than at the beginning of the process, it would be necessary to adopt either the supposition of Rey or that of Mayow. Lavoisier made a series of experiments.
At the same time, under the Contra-Levitatem maxim, it was impossible to conceive of substance except as ponderable substance. These experiments are rightly regarded as the actual beginning of modern chemistry. In Lavoisier we find an observer of nature who was predominantly interested in what the scales could tell about changes in substances.
And Lavoisier, the most philosophical chemist of the century, retained heat and light on a par with oxygen, hydrogen, iron, and the rest, in his list of elementary substances.
This circumstance is expressed in the common language by saying that a body burns ill or with difficulty." It needed the genius of such a man as Lavoisier to complete the refutation of the false but firmly grounded phlogiston theory, and against such a book as his Elements of Chemistry the feeble weapons of the supporters of the phlogiston theory were hurled in vain.
Now, as every fermentable liquor requires open vessels, the hogshead of the rum distiller loses as much spirit as that of Lavoisier: hence it is plain how far the above proportion operates to the disadvantage of the fermer. 3dly. Another source of loss arises in the distilling vessels themselves. Nothing is more imperfect than the stills of a whiskey distillery.
Sweden honored and rewarded Scheele and Bergman for their efforts; England received the intellectuality of Cavendish with less appreciation than the Continent, and a fanatical mob drove Priestley out of the country; while France, by sending Lavoisier to the guillotine, demonstrated how dangerous it was, at that time at least, for an intelligent Frenchman to serve his fellowman and his country well.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking