Royal Society, preface

In the preface of his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Ain a collection which grew too large for publication in the Royal Society s Transactions, Priestley expressed his views on experimentation and theorizing in terms reminiscent of Boyles comment of a century before. Priestley expressed his distrust of premature explanations in the following passage. 

I am very grateful for the tremendous support I have had from many people when asking for information and help with datasets, and permission where required. Chemweb is thanked for agreement to present material modified from articles originally published in their e-zine, The Alchemist, and the Royal Society of Chemistry for permission to base the text of Chapter 5 on material originally published in The Analyst [125, 2125-2154 (2000)]. A full list of acknowledgements for die datasets used in diis text is presented after this preface. 

Hooke R. (1665) Preface to Micrographia. The Royal Society of London. 

The whole problem of abbreviated titles is aptly reviewed by Mitchell in his preface to the second edition of the World List, where he states that the use of abbreviated titles is a necessity in scientific literature, but unless the abbreviations have been devised so that each one indicates only one periodical and also unless they are in general use, they fail of their purpose. The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, held in London from June 21 to July 2, 1948, recommended that the World List abbreviations be adopted by abstracting agencies. 

Higgins s Comparative View is mostly concerned with a clever refutation of Kirwan s Essay on Phlogiston (1787), the French edition (see p. 662) being also mentioned as seen first after the section on the marine acid was completed. The sections deal with the composition and decomposition of water (p. i), the composition of acids (p. 8), vitriolic acid (p. 18), nitrous acid (p. 82), marine acid (p. 179), the calcination of metals via sicca (p. 219), the calcination of metals by steam and the decomposition of water (p. 240), the reduction of metallic calces by charcoal and the formation of fixed air (p. 249), the solubility of metals (p. 254)> the precipitation of metals by each other (p. 259), and (as an appendix) an analysis of the human calculus with observations on its origin (p. 283), which the preface (p. xiii) says was sent to the Royal Society in 1787 and read in Spring 1788 (it was not published and is in the archives of the Royal Society). 

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