Antoine Lavoisier: Chemistry

Antoine Lavoisier was French chemist. Explore interesting quotes on chemistry.
Antoine Lavoisier: 14 quotes9 likes

“When I began the following Work, my only object was to extend and explain more fully the Memoir which I read at the public meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the month of April 1787, on the necessity of reforming and completing the Nomenclature of Chemistry. While engaged in this employment, I perceived, better than I had ever done before, the justice of the following maxims of the Abbé de Condillac, in his System of Logic, and some other of his works. "We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged."”

Antoine Lavoisier

Source: Elements of Chemistry (1790), p.xiii

“Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.”

Antoine Lavoisier

Source: Elements of Chemistry (1790), p.xiv

“Here, then: a revolution [in science and chemistry] has taken place in an important part of human knowledge since your departure from Europe… I will consider this revolution to be well advanced and even completely accomplished if you range yourself with us. …After having brought you up to date on what is happening in chemistry, it would be well to speak to you about our political revolution. We regard it as done and without any possibility of return to the old order.”

Antoine Lavoisier

Letter to Benjamin Franklin (Feb 2, 1790) as quoted by I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (1985)

“We are… bound to attach the greatest importance to the preliminary step taken by Lavoisier, who is even more justly called the father of modern chemistry than Kepler is called the father of modern astronomy. The exact claims of Lavoisier to this important place in the history of chemistry have been variously stated: …since his time, and greatly through his labours, the quantitative method has been established as the ultimate test of chemical facts; the principle of this method being the rule that in all changes of combination and reaction, the total weight of the various ingredients—be they elementary bodies or compounds—remains unchanged. The science of chemistry was thus established upon an exact, a mathematical basis. By means of this method Lavoisier, utilising and analysing the results gained by himself and others before him, notably those of Priestley, Cavendish, and Black, succeeded in destroying the older theory of combustion, the so-called phlogistic theory.”

Antoine Lavoisier

John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=xqwQAAAAYAAJ (1903)