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Updated: June 25, 2025
We have dissertations on the cause of earthquakes and of muscular motion, on the Athanasian Creed, on fluxions, on phlogiston, on the physical cause of the Deluge, on Irish literature, on the origin of language, on the evidences for Christianity, and on all other sorts of unrelated topics.
In the oxygenating operation of inflammable and combustible bodies when burning, those ingenious chemists overlooked the operation of phlogistic matter, which has no weight, and which escapes on that occasion, as I have had occasion to show in a dissertation upon phlogiston, and in the Philosophy of Light, Heat, and Fire.
The principle of phlogiston could be recognised by the senses as it was in the act of escaping from a substance; and the other principle of combustible things was scarcely a Principle in the alchemical sense, for, in the case of metals at any rate, it remained when the things which had contained it were burnt, and could be seen, handled, and weighed.
If we did not know that what we call quantity of substance is measured by the property named mass, we might very well accept the proposition that the entrance of phlogiston into a substance decreases the quantity, hence the mass, and, therefore, the weight, of the substance.
The phlogisteans taught that the earthy principle of a metal remains in the form of ash, cinders, or calx, when the metal is calcined, or, as they expressed it, when the metal is deprived of its phlogiston.
This was an important step, and although Boyle is not directly responsible for the phlogiston theory, it is probable that his experiments on the atmosphere influenced considerably the real founders, Becker and Stahl. Boyle gave very definitely his idea of how he thought air might be composed.
This new work when given to the world was not merely an epoch-making book; it was revolutionary. It not only discarded phlogiston altogether, but set forth that metals are simple elements, not compounds of "earth" and "phlogiston." It upheld Cavendish's demonstration that water itself, like air, is a compound of oxygen with another element.
In respiration, part of this air, passing the membranes of the lungs, unites with the blood and imparts to it its florid color, while the remainder, uniting with phlogiston exhaled from venous blood, forms mixed air. It is dephlogisticated air combined with water that enables fishes to live in it."
He knows that a metal, when calcined, increases in weight, a discovery of the greatest importance, as eventually brought to bear in the destruction of the doctrine of Phlogiston of Stahl, and which has been imputed to Europeans of a much later time.
The upholder of the phlogistic theory could not think of burning as possible unless there was a suitable receptacle for the phlogiston of the burning substance: when burning occurred in the air, the part played by the air, according to the phlogistic chemist, was to receive the expelled phlogiston; in this sense the air acted as the pabulum, or nourishment, of the burning substance.
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