Elements of Natural History and Chemistry

Figure 3. A typical late 18th-century affinity diagram. (From A. Fourcroy, Elements of Natural History and Chemistry, 1790).

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ehap. 52, London, 1776-1788, in a footnote on bitumen in the eontext of Greek fire. Antoine, Comte de Foureroy, Elements of Natural History and Chemistry —translated from the last Paris edition, 1789, being the third—, 4 v., Edinburgh, 1790. 

In addition to his voluminous work, Fourcroy was also a voluminous writer. Though described as verbose his writings were accurate and understandable. Several women attended his lectures (including Marie Roland, destined to meet the guillotine), and Fourcroy wrote some works directed specifically to this audience. He also wrote a textbook. Elements of Natural History and Chemistry, the second edition of which presented both the phlogiston and oxygen theories. When Fourcroy presented the second edition to the Academy of Sciences, Lavoisier was on the committee appointed to examine it. Perhaps because Lavoisier was aware of how important the full endorsement of such an influential person in French chemical education would be, the publication of the book was held up until Fourcroy became convinced of the validity of Lavoisier s theory. It happened at about the same time as the conversion of Berthollet. 

Tr. (anon.) of Fourcroy s Elements of Natural History and Chemistry, London, 1790, i, pref. xii. 

De Fourcroy, A.T. et al. (1788) Elements of Natural History, and of Chemistry, being the second edition of the elementary lectures on those sciences, first published in 1782, and now greatly enlarged and improved, by the Author, M. de Fourcroy, doctor of the faculty of medicine at Paris, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, andc, andc, andc, Translated into English. With occasional notes, and an historical preface, by the translator, vol. IV, G.G.J. and J. Robinson, Pater-Noster-Row, London, 465 pp. (quoted after Dorozhkin, 2012). 

It is therefore to the vital air [oxygen] of the manganese [pyrolusite], which combines with the marine acid, that the formation of the dephlogisticated marine acid is due. I ought to state that this theory was presented and announced some time ago by M. Lavoisier, and that M. de Fourcroy made use of it in his Elements of Chemistry and Natural History to explain the properties of dephlogisticated marine acid such as they were then known. 

Such are reasons why the story of the elements is not simply a tale of a hundred or so different types of atom, each with its unique properties and idiosyncracies. It is a story about our cultural interactions with the nature and composition of matter. The Whiggish history of chemistry as a gradual elucidation and tabulation of matter s building blocks obscures a deeper and more profound enquiry into the constitution of the world, and the mutability of that constitution by human or natural agency. 

A.-F. de Fourcroy, Elements of Chemistry and Natural History, 5th edition with notes by John Thomson, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1798), vol. i, 113-114. 

History.—The discovery of niobium is intimately connected with that of tantalum, firstly because these metals are consistently associated together in their natural ores, and secondly, because their separation from one another has proved an extremely difficult matter. Indeed, the chemistry of these elements is so closely parallel that considerable time elapsed before their separate identities were definitely established. 

The natural history of chemistry consists since many centuries in empirical rules about the relative affinity of various elements. Though metathetical reactions are frequently used in preparation, the main origin is the filtering of insoluble precipitates, as when an aqueous solution of silver sulphate and another of barium iodide leave almost pure water in the filtrate ... 

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