The Chemical Revolution and its Chymical Antecedents

Abstract

In 1989, the late Frederic L. Holmes published an important cor rective to the history of eighteenth-century chemistry. In the bril liantly succinct 144 pages of his Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise, Holmes argued that historians have tradi tionally placed far too much emphasis on Antoine-Laurent Lavoi sier's resounding defeat of the phlogiston theory and indeed on the chemistry of airs more generally. Such radically discontinuist pic tures of Lavoisier's contribution had given the impression that his immediate predecessors contributed little but error to the history of chemistry. Holmes advocated a much more balanced treatment of chemistry in the era of the Enlightenment, a new approach that would give due consideration to the quotidian developments of ordi nary chemists before and during the Chemical Revolution. In this way it would be possible not only to arrive at a truer picture of the goals common to eighteenth-century chemists, but to chart the