Contexts and Limits of Lavoisier's Analytical Plant Chemistry: Plant Materials and their Classification

Abstract

This paper concerns eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century chemists' ontologies of materials, along with their modes of classification. The focus is on plant substances, their place in the "chemical revolution" in the last third of the eighteenth century, and the ways in which chemists individuated, identified, and ordered plant substances in the five decades before and after that event. The main goal of the paper is to describe the problems that the "new chemists" confronted in their attempts to assimilate plant materials into their analytical taxonomic programme. Historical analysis shows that there were both external and internal obstacles to that assimilation, and these can be illuminated by studying the programme's broader historical context.