The Sceptical Chymist

Boyle, R. (1661). The Sceptical Chymist. Everyman Library Edition, 1911. Bronsted, J. N. (1923). Einige Bemerkungen uber den Begriff der Sauren und Basen. Recueil des Travaux chimiques des Pays-Bas et de la Belgique, 42, 718-28. 

The science of chemistry languished until Robert Boyle—a brilliant, fanatically religious man—wrote The Sceptical Chymist in 1661. He gave scientists a new way of seeing the world by defining an element as any substance that could not be broken down into a simpler substance, an idea that closely coincides with todays notion of an element. Boyles insight led chemists into their labs, where they heated solids and evaporated liquids and analyzed the gases that boiled off and the residues that remained behind. They isolated a flood of new elements. 

Boyle, Robert. The sceptical chymist. Everyman Library. 1661 reprint, 1964 or 65. 

Davidson, John S. Annotations to Boyle s "The sceptical chymist". rhttp //www.chem.gla.ac.uk/staff/alanc/ annotati.ons.pdfl. 2001. 

Webster, Charles. Water as the ultimate principle of Nature the background to Boyle s Sceptical Chymist. Ambix 33 (1966) 96-107. 

Morris, Richard. The last sorcerers the path from alchemy to the periodic table. Washington (DC) Joseph Henry P, 2003. xii, 282 p. ISBN 0-309-08905-0 Contents Preface — 1. The four elements — 2. Prelude to the birth of chemistry — 3. The sceptical chymist — 4. The discovery of the elements — 5. A nail for the coffin — 6. "Only an instant to cut off that head" — 7. The atom — 8. Problems with atoms — 9. The periodic law — 10. Deciphering the atom — Epilogue the continuing search — appendix. A catalog of the elements — Further reading — Index... 

The Sceptical Chymist, which is written in the form of a dialogue between five people (two of whom mysteriously disappear in the part following the second title page and reappear near the end of the book), is a discussion of the chemical philosophies that prevailed in Boyle s day, the Aristotelian theory of the four elements and Paracelsus s theory of three principles. Boyle discusses them in exhaustive detail in order to foster skepticism concerning them. 

Boyle expounded no alternative theory in The Sceptical Chymist. He concerned himself mainly with fostering skepticism about the Aristotelian and Paracelsian chemical philosophies. But the book is a science classic nevertheless. Little progress could be made in chemistry until those theories were overthrown. To be sure, Boyle failed to accomplish this and belief in the four-element theory, especially, lingered on for quite a long time. However, Boyle showed that it was possible to doubt long-established ideas, thus performing a great service to science. 

When Boyle published the second edition of The Sceptical Chymist in 1680, he added an appendix that gave his definition of a chemical element. He wrote ... 

In 1661 Robert Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, a book in which he discussed the criteria by which one can decide whether a substance is or is not a chemical element. He concluded that the four Aristotelian elements and three principles commonly accepted in his time cannot be real chemical elements since they can neither compose nor be... 

Robert Boyle stated in 1661, in his Sceptical Chymist, drat sal ammoniac is composed of muriatic (hydrochloric) acid and the volatile alkali (ammonia) and told how to separate the urinous and common salts (27). In 1716 Geoffroy the Younger demonstrated the composition of sal ammoniac and prepared it by sublimation (28, 29). In the same year, the Jesuit missionary Father Sicard described its preparation at Dam ire or Damayer, one mile from die City of El Mansura in the Nile Delta. In twenty-five large laboratories and several smaller ones, it was sublimed in glass vessels from die soot of die burned dung of camels and cows, to which, he said, had been added salt and urine. Lemere, the French consul at Cairo, described die process in 1719 for the Academy of Sciences in Paris, but made no mention of salt or urine (29, 30, 31). 

Boyle, Robert, The Sceptical Chymist, J. M Dent and Sons, London... 

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