Doctrine of Phlogiston Established

Here he was welcomed by many societies and individuals. He was offered the ministry of the Unitarian Church in New York, and was urged to take the professorship of chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania, but he finally decided to accept neither, and established himself at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he built a house and laboratory and spent the rest of his days. Here he completed his History of the Church from the Fall of the Western Empire to the Reformation. He wrote many theological papers, continued his chemical experiments, wrote two defenses of the phlogiston theory, the more elaborate on Doctrine of Phlogiston Established and that of the Composition of Water Refuted, printed at Northumberland in 1800, with a second edition at Philadelphia in 1803. He died in 1804 in his seventy-first year, and was buried in the Quaker cemetery at Northumberland. 

J. Priestley, The Doctrine of Phlogiston Established, and that of the Composition of Water Refuted (Northumberland, PA Printed for the Author, 1800), pp. 51-2. 

Phe Doctrine of Phlogiston Established and that of the Decomposition of Water Refuted (Philadelphia P. Byrne, 1803). 

Soon after, the first journals that dealt solely with chemistry appeared. The Chemisches Journal, in 1778, by Lorenz von Crell was founded to encourage German chemistry, followed by the Annales de Chimie, in 1789 in France. The Annales de Chimie is the first journal to promote a program, since it only published chemistry in the then-new nomenclature. As late as 1800 Joseph Priestley published his Doctrine of Phlogiston Established in the United States, but from 1789 on, there was no longer any reference to phlogiston in the Annales de Chimie. Only things cast in Lavoisier s new theoretical scheme and nomenclature appeared there. 

In the United States Joseph Priestley wrote in an appendix to his work The Doctrine of Phlogiston Established that Mr. H. Davy s Essays. .. impressed me with a high opinion of his philosophical acumen, but Davy never quite recovered from the criticism of his homeland colleagues. 

XI. The Doctrine of Phlogiston Established and that of the Composition of Water Refuted, 8°, Northumberland (U.S.A.), 1800 (xv, 90 pp., i leaf, folding plate of soda-water app.) 2 ed. with additions, and Observations on the Conversion of Iron into Steel, in a letter to Mr. Nicholson, 8 , Northumberland and Philadelphia, 1803. 

Several of these papers in the Medical Repository were also published in Nicholson s youmal and are included in the second ed. (1803) of Priestley s The Doctrine of Phlogiston Established which has a new preface referring to them. In it (p. 117) he refers to Davy s Essays published by Beddoes (see Vol. IV) and says (p. ii8) Mr. Davy s nitrogen I suspect, will be no longer lived than the French hydrogen probably meaning the name. 

---