Vegetable Staticks

What introduced air into chemistry was some hard, unarguable evidence that air did indeed enter into the apparent composition of solid bodies/ The evidence could hardly have appeared under a more unlikely title than Vegetable Staticks, published by Stephen Hales (1677-1761) in 1727. The book was in most respects exactly what the title implied, an account of a number of ingenious experiments in the investigation of the flow of the juices within plants. But by far the largest chapter is devoted to Experiments, whereby to prove, that a considerable quantity of air is inspired by Plants. ... 

Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (London Oldbourne Reprint, 1961), Introduction, xxxi, emphasis in the original. 

Hales, Vegetable Staticks, Preface, xxvii. Hales, Vegetable Staticks, xxvii. 

Of particular interest to our story is the translation of Hales Vegetable Staticks into French in 1735. Prior to this time it is hard to find in any of the Memoires of the Paris Academy any reference to air at all. Functionally, air had simply disappeared from the chemical tradition of Lemery that characterizes French chemistry of the period. Hales translator was le conte de Buffon (1707—1788), just then beginning his own career. Buffon was then, even as he has become known to historians, primarily a natural historian rather than a chemist, and his interest in the Vegetable Staticks no doubt originally came from that devotion. Yet what Buffon emphasizes in his Preface du Traducteur is the novelty and importance of Hales work on air. Even the title has been modified to make the work on air more prominently displayed. The full English title is reproduced on p. 124 (Fig. 2). 

Herman Boerhaave was a professor of the medical school of Leiden whose chemical textbook became a very important contributor to the early eighteenth-century organization of chemistry, as will be seen in the next chapter. But he seems to have vacillated on the role of air as a chemical component of bodies. Initially he considered air in essentially the same way as Boyle, a chaos of various smokes and effluvia which accounted for its particular chemical actions, but whose elastic parts were entirely without chemical behavior. After the appearance of Vegetable Staticks, however, he seems to have accepted Hales evidence without really abandoning his earlier view. When Lavoisier in 1774 summarized the earlier literature on the chemical fixing and liberation of air, he wrote of Boerhaaves views thus ... 

That AIR can also be a part of chemical combination had been pretty much established by the work of Stephen Hales, whose results had been published in his Vegetable Staticks in 1727. As we have seen, this work had been translated into French by Rouelles own sponsor in the Jardin du Roi, Georges Louis Leclerc le conte de Buffon (1707-1788), in 1735. The idea... 

Hales, Stephen. Vegetable Staticks On An Account of Some Statical ExperT ments on the Sap in Vegetables Being an Essay towards a Natural History of Vegetation. [London, 1727.] London Oldbourne Reprint, 1961. 

J. R. Glauber, Philosophische Oefen, Amsterdam, 1648 H. Bocrhaave, Elementa chemim, Lugduni Batavorum, 1732 R. Boyle, The Usefulness of Experimental Philosophy, Oxford, 1663 S. Hales, Vegetable Staticks, London, 1727 J. Priestley, Observations on Different Kinds of Air, London, 3. 208, 1779 J. B. van Helmont, Ortus medicines, Amsterdam, 68, 1648. 

Vegetable staticks or, An account of some statical experiments on the sap in vegetables, London, 1727-33, 2 vols. Vol. II has title, Statical essays. 

Hales, Stephen. Vegetable Staticks. The Scientific Book Guild, London. 

Guerlac could not determine if Lavoisier read the Vegetable Staticks before 1772, but argued that Lavoisier should have been familiar with Hales s experiments reproduced in Rouelle s lectures Guerlac, Continental Reputation of Stephen Hales, 25-35. On Lavoisier s apparatus, see F. L. Holmes, Lavoisier the Experimentalist, Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 5, 1989, 24-31 idem, The Evolution of Lavoisier s Chemical Apparatus. ... 

Hales, Stephen. Vegetable Staticks or, An account of some statical experiments on the sap in vegetables being an essay towards a natural history of vegetation. Also, a specimen of an attempt to analyse the air, by a great variety of chymo-statical experiments, which were read at several meetings before the Royal Society (London W., and J. Innys, 1727). 

Hales, S., Vegetable Staticks (1727), Oldboume Science Library, Jar-... 

FIGURE 179. Early pneumatic apparatus for measuring airs derived from distillation of vegetable matter [from the second edition of Stephan Hales Vegetable Staticks (London, 1731) first edition, 1727]. 

FIGURE 180. Experiments measuring gases derived from peas (from Hales 1731 edition of Vegetable Staticks). 

The affinity table of E. F. Geoffroy (1718) (VoL III, p. 52) was the basis of subsequent treatment till the time of Berthollet (1801), Additions were made by Macquer (1749) (Vol. Ill, p. 86) and Baume (VoL III, p. 93). In Geoffroy s time the Paris Academy frowned on Newtonian attraction, but after Voltaire s advocacy this was admitted into French science and was turned to account in explaining chemical phenomena by the natural historian Buffon, who had translated Hales s Vegetable Staticks (1735) and was interested in chemistry. 

By breathing through weighed wood ashes (which absorb moisture and some carbon dioxide) Hales found that 20 4 oz. Troy of water is carried off by respiration in 24 hours. R. Foregger notes that Hales had two types of respiratory apparatus (i) closed circuit Vegetable Staticks, 1727), (ii) open circuit A Description of Ventilators 1743, respirator ). 

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