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Updated: May 25, 2025
But with all Boyle's explanations of the composition of air, he still believed that there was an inexplicable something, a "vital substance," which he was unable to fathom, and which later became the basis of Stahl's phlogiston theory.
Such expressions as "dephlogisticated" and "phlogisticated" would obviously have little meaning to a generation who were no longer to believe in the existence of phlogiston. It was appropriate that a revolution in chemical thought should be accompanied by a corresponding revolution in chemical names, and to Lavoisier belongs chiefly the credit of bringing about this revolution.
The phlogiston in a combustible substance was supposed to be so intimately associated with something else that our senses cannot perceive it; nevertheless, the theory said, it is there; we can see only the escaping phlogiston, we can perceive only the phlogiston which is set free from its combination with other things.
Stahl observed that many substances which differed much from one another in various respects were alike in one respect; they were all combustible. Stahl said that the phlogiston of a combustible thing escapes as the substance burns, and, becoming apparent to the senses, is named fire or flame.
On this principle, then, the metals were compound bodies, earths combined with phlogiston. SCIENCE AND ECCLESIASTICISM. But during the eighteenth century the balance was introduced as an instrument of chemical research.
He knows that out of the leaping flames, whether they be composed of phlogiston or incandescent hydrogen, loved fancies flashed into the minds of the elder race, born of the flicker of flame on the imagination of a primitive people, backed by dark forests, night and wind-riding storms. If he have the hardihood let him light his Yule log in the winter twilight of the snowy woods.
The impulse to worship fire still lingers within us and though we have better creeds than that of Zoroaster and truer spiritual ideals than the Parsees we can have no more appealing symbol of the purely spiritual than flame. Phlogiston might well be another word for soul and we are unkind to the old philosophers to take them too literally.
Looking back, we cannot think of phlogiston as a substance, or as a thing, in the modern meanings of these terms as they are used in natural science. Nowadays we think, we are obliged to think, of the sum of the quantities of all the things in the universe as unchanging, and unchangeable by any agency whereof we have definite knowledge.
The discovery of oxygen was the last but most important blow to the tottering phlogiston theory, though Priestley himself would not admit it. In the matter of brilliant discoveries in a brief space of time Scheele probably eclipsed all his great contemporaries. He had a veritable genius for interpreting chemical reactions and discovering new substances, in this respect rivalling Priestley himself.
He demonstrated the fallaciousness of both these theories in 1768-1769 by elaborate experiments, a single investigation of this series occupying one hundred and one days. In 1771 he gave the first blow to the phlogiston theory by his experiments on the calcination of metals.
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