Elements of Chemistry
Notebook
Antoine Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry (Traité élémentaire de chimie, 1789) is the founding textbook of modern chemistry, written on the eve of the French Revolution. It overturned the reigning phlogiston theory, established the conservation of mass, defined an element operationally, and introduced — with its famous Table of Simple Substances — the systematic chemical nomenclature still used today. Divided into three parts (the formation of gases and acids; the combination of acids with bases; and chemical instruments and operations), it reads as both rigorous science and a manifesto for a new way of reasoning about matter. This is Robert Kerr's 1790 English translation.
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