Jacob, textbook

This distinction between "theoretical" and "practical" chemistry was one observed in textbooks throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A tradition of "philosophical chemistry" answered Libavius s challenge for chemistry to abandon alchemical magic and Paracelsian iatrochemistry in favor of newly philosophic principles in chemistry. Jacob Bamer s seventeenth-century work, Chymiaphilosophica, is an early example later, more famous texts in chemical philosophy are those of John Dalton (1808), Davy (1812), and Dumas (1837). 14 But texts called chemical philosophy were fewer than those in "natural philosophy," and very few texts in chemical philosophy were written after 1840.15 Why was this the case ... 

Chemistry textbooks inform us that John Dalton formulated Atomic Theory in 1803 and imply that atoms were accepted from then on. Actually, such acceptance was far from universal and late-nineteenth-century books such as Brodie s The Calculus of Chemical Operations (London, 1866,1877) and Hunt s A New Basis for Chemistry A Chemical Philosophy (Boston, 1887), although antiatomic In nature, were not written by cranks or nutters. The eminent physicist Ernst Mach and the famous chemist Wilhelm Ostwald resisted the reality of atoms Into the beginning of the twentieth century. Jacob Bronowski strongly implies that the suicide in 1906 of Ludwig Boltzmann, who successfully explained heat as atomic and molecular motion, stemmed in part from his failure to totally convince the scientific community that atoms are real. ... 

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