Keill

As already noted, Newton replaced the concept of mechanical entanglement with the postulate of short-range interparticle forces of attraction and repulsion and applied this model in his Principia of 1687 to rationalize Boyle s law relating gas pressure and volume. However, it was not until the first decade of the 18th century that this new dynamic or force model was first specifically applied to chemical phenomena by the British chemists, John Freind and John Keill, and by Newton himself in the finalized version of the 31st query appended to the 1717 and later editions of his famous treatise on optics, where he succinctly summarized his new particulate program for chemistry ... 

Guyton s comprehensive vision for theoretical chemistry consisted of a dissolution model of chemical action. He added the Newtonian component of attraction to Louis Lemery s mechanistic model of solution process, drawing on a host of chemical authors Macquer, Boerhaave, Hoffman, Spielmann, Cadet, Boyle, Friend, Keill, Barchusen, Lemery, Bohn, Le Sage, and Limbourg. He also accepted Buffon s premise that chemical affinity or attraction depended on the shape and the relative position of particles, and that it followed the inverse square law ... 

For biographical details on James Keill see also Valadez, F.M., O Malley, C.D. (1971). James Keill of Northampton, Physician, Anatomist, and Physiologist. MedicalHistorj,pj, 317-335. 

According to Guerrini, James Keill was the first to develop a physiology based upon the Newtonian forces of attraction. In his Essays upon Several Parts of the Animal O economy (1717) Keill wrote on animal secretion ... 

Unlike Pitcairne, whose forces of attraction operate between particles and the passages in the glands, Keill spoke about the attraction between particles themselves. This means that for Keill the corpuscles themselves were in-... 

Boerhaave s great emphasis on the creation of the whole stmcture of the body at the same time was directed at those who hoped to trace down the cause of the vital interaction of the fluids exclusively in the stmcture of the body (...) or in the fluids alone Although Boerhaave does not mention any names, we can perhaps say that here the later Boerhaave speaks his mind. He does not seek the cause of life in the hydrauhcs of the fluids hke Pitcairne had done, nor in the nature of the particles of the fluids themselves, like Keill had argued. Instead, Boerhaave proposed to keep to the notion that nature has made the body in its entirety previously, and that, once it is so adjusted, one single impulse is given to it which suddenly imparts motion to the whole and causes this to continue. However, Boerhaave did not leave God out of his medicine, for he held that God ultimately is the Father and Keeper of the human race. ... 

Keill, J. (1717). Tssays on several Parts of the Animal Oeconomy. London. 

Guerrini, A. (1985). James Keill, George Cheyne and Newtonian Physiology, i6 o-i-/40. Journal of the History of Biology, 18, 147-166. 

Indeed, attempts 100 years earlier to apply the physics of the age— Newton s great work—to chemistry failed. Among the first to attempt these applications were mathematician John Keill (1671-1721) and physician John Freind (1675—1728). Newton had expressed the force arising from gravitational attraction between two bodies with the formula ... 

Nicholas Lemery, A Course of Chymistry,— The Third Edition, taken from the Eighth in French, trans. James Keill, London, 1698. 

Harris and Keill attended Lemery s lectures Keill says they occupied 3 or 4 days a week for 8 weeks and he gives a programme extending over 34 days. 

The book (i, 3) sa)rs Keill first tried to reduce chemical operations to the... 

In an outline of a course in true physical chemistry for the use of young students, Lomonosov says this is a science which explains on the basis of the laws and experiments of physics what occurs in compound bodies by means of chemical operations , and the experimental part includes the determination of melting points and the solubilities of salts. A programme for research included the determination of the specific heats and viscosities of solutions. Lomonosov, who had a good mathematical training, emphasised that chemistry should be developed on mathematical lines, as had been done by Keill in 1708 and Freind in 1709 (see Vol. II, p. 478), not to mention the book by Swedenborg (see p. 165) of 1721 on the explanation of chemistry by geometry. 

Probably from this period, between about 1704 and 1709, there survives a manuscript fragment of a lecture by Keill on chemistry, titled De operationum chymicarum ratione mechanica. As the title indicates, the lecture focused on the mechanical philosophy, by which the Operations of Chymistry are explained. In style and format, this lecture seems to have been intended to fit into Keill s natural philosophy course. Like earlier lecturers on the topic, Keill emphasized the performance of specific chemical operations, rather than using chemistry as a basis for a wider theoretical discussion of the nature of matter. However, he did not place these operations in the usual medical context, but discussed industrial uses. This lecture therefore represents an attempt to place the teaching of chemistry in a new context. 

---