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Motivated by her interest in fabric arts, late-eighteenth-century British chemist Elizabeth Fulhame experimentally investigated whether cloths of gold, silver, and other metals could be made by chemical rather than mechanical processes. In contrast to other women studying science at this time, she not only published an original monograph under her own name that challenged both the phlogistic and antiphlogistic views of combustion but also proposed an alternative explanation for oxidation and reduction. Although her contemporaries widely cited her innovative research, her history is not well known, yet a careful analysis of her work provides further insights into the reception of the antiphlogistic theory and the challenges and limitations experienced by women in chemistry during this period.

This essay focuses on an unknown Latin translation of Georg Ernst Stahl's treatise on the nature of sulfur ( Zufällige Gedancken und Nützliche Bedencken über den Streit von dem so genannten Sulfure ). The original edition, published in 1718, laid the foundation for the phlogiston theory, which dominated European chemistry until the early 1770s. However, the dissemination of the treatise on sulfur outside the German states remained limited. Its Latin translation proposes a different scenario as it was owned by three prominent French chemists: Étienne-François Geoffroy, Jean Hellot and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Geoffroy's early interest in Stahl's chemistry has been evidenced and it is suggested that the acquisition of the manuscript might be linked to his connection with Stahl through Caspar Neumann, a chemist from Berlin. When he entered in the possession of the manuscript Jean Hellot wrote a long excerpt of Stahl's work. Lavoisier acquired the manuscript in 1766, and his critical reading of Stahl's work significantly influenced his own effort to outline a new theory of combustion. This manuscript represents a significant historical connection between Stahl's phlogiston theory and Lavoisier's revolutionary ideas.

Despite the increasing interest in Italian medicine, comparatively little attention has been paid to the establishment of iatrochemistry. Though this process spread throughout the Peninsula, Naples witnessed an impressive growth of chemical research and the outbreak of a conflict between the medical establishment and the chemical physicians. The purpose of this article is to explore the emergence of chemical medicine in Naples in the period that precedes the founding (1663) of the Accademia degli Investiganti . In the first part of the seventeenth century, chemistry achieved recognition in settings like academies, pharmacies, hospitals, and monasteries. Chemical studies and the making of new remedies were spurred by the scientific exchange that Neapolitan savants established with scholars from different areas. The so-called medical pluralism and the recurrent outbreaks of epidemics stimulated the introduction of new chemical therapies, which coexisted with old ones . The establishment of chemical medicine was triggered by Marco Aurelio Severino (1580-1656), who, besides promoting chemical remedies, resorted to chemical theories, including Paracelsian ones, to account for physiological processes. Severino was the mentor of the chemical physicians who gave rise to the Accademia degli Investiganti . One of Severino's disciples was Giuseppe Donzelli (1596-1670), who fostered chemical remedies in Naples.

In what follows I examine Diderot's chemically influenced vital materialism. Once condemned as "mechanistic," materialism has had something of a renaissance in recent decades as scholars have rediscovered a tradition of "vital materialism" which they have opposed to older, cruder forms of the idea, e.g. materialisms full of life, affect, chimiatry, and transformation. Sometimes these rediscoveries have attached themselves to a figure of the past, like Margaret Cavendish's metaphysics of active matter, or to a construct of the still-emerging future, like Karen Barad's quantum physics-nourished "agential realism" present in all of matter. Another question concerns the extent to which these revivals of "vital" or "active-matter" materialism should be traced back to older Renaissance naturalisms. In what follows, I return to Diderot and the question of his "vital materialism." Diderot draws both on older traditions, approvingly citing Van Helmont and gesturing towards a new chemistry of living matter and also speaks the language of scientific revolution, writing that "We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences." In earlier work I sought to connect this language of revolution in the sciences to the emergence of biology as a science. Here I focus on his chemically charged materialism.

During the eighteenth century, authors of chemical treatises and courses on chemistry often introduced their work with a chapter devoted to the history of chemistry. While there may have been different reasons for the use of history, its importance was never seriously questioned. However, when Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) took a professional interest in chemistry in the early 1770s, he progressively became uneasy with this literary tradition. In this essay, I intend to explore the ways in which Lavoisier looked at the history of chemistry and to show how, from the 1780s onwards, he began to adopt a hostile attitude towards historical erudition. This vision, which culminated in the publication of the Traité élémentaire de chimie (Paris, 1789), was not only the result of a stylistic preference but constituted a direct attack on a way of doing chemistry from which Lavoisier intended to distance himself.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, Western countries witnessed an explosion of societies and publishing initiatives aimed at creating and disseminating what contemporaries called useful knowledge. These "economic societies," "societies of friends of the country," or "societies of improvers" sought to improve their local communities through the scientific management of natural and social resources. This article analyses the opportunities that this movement of patriots opened up for women in chemistry, who went from being "exceptional women" to representing themselves as female "friends of the country." This article shows the different ways in which these women "friends of the country" negotiated their authorship, agency, and public visibility in order to maintain gender conventions and the importance of their kinship networks. It also illustrates the other side of the coin: how women's contributions also benefited male scientific societies, which gained visibility and secured the social position of their members in enlightened circles.

Between 1920 and 1922, the University of Bristol biochemist, Maximilian Nierenstein, published four papers in a series exploring the structure of catechin in the Journal of the Chemical Society. The Society then abruptly refused to accept any more of his papers on catechin, or any other subject. It provided him with no reasons for the embargo until 1925. It then transpired that Nierenstein was boycotted because it was deemed that he had not responded adequately to criticisms of his work made by his rival in catechin research, the German natural products chemist, Karl Freudenberg. It was not until 1929 that, as a result of a petition by a group of his former Bristol pupils and friends, that Nierenstein was again permitted to publish in the Society's journal. The paper explores the Chemical Society's treatment of Nierenstein in detail, sheds new light on his career and his reaction to the Society's unprecedented boycott, examines some of the structural chemistry involved in the disputes, and discusses whether Nierenstein's research deserves the label of 'bad science'.

From 1797 to 1801 a controversy played out on the pages of the Medical Repository , the first scientific journal published in the United States. At its centre was the well-known feud between the followers of Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley, the lone supporter of the phlogiston model. The American debate, however, had more than two sides. The Americans chemists, Samuel Latham Mitchill and Benjamin Woodhouse, who rushed to support Priestley did not defend his scientific views. Rather, as citizens of a republic, they defended his right to have them. They also castigated the assertions of the "French chemists," whose claims that the new chemistry obviated debate seemed unsettlingly similar to the dictatorial ambitions of the French state. Using the Medical Repository, Mitchill and Woodhouse sought a compromise that validated the new chemistry, but united it with a more egalitarian form of discourse. The desired balance eluded them. Priestley proved too stubborn, and as the French Revolution descended into dictatorship and war, Mitchill and Woodhouse came more to realize that truly prising French chemistry from the culture of the revolutionary era. The episode left Mitchill and Woodhouse disillusioned with chemistry and hoping to redirect scientific enthusiasm to more pious ends.

Eighteenth-century events, replete with Dickensian dualities, brought two Enlightenment families to America. Pierre-Samuel du Pont and Joseph Priestley contemplated relocating their families decades before immigrating. After arriving, they discovered deficiencies in education and chemistry. Their experiences were indicative of the challenges in transmitting transatlantic chemistry. The Priestleys were primed to found an American chemical legacy. Science connected Priestley to British manufacturers, Continental chemists, and American statesmen. Priestley's marriage into the Wilkinson ironmaster dynasty, and Lunar Society membership, helped his sons apprentice, and befriend manufacturer-chemist Thomas Cooper. However, ideological persecution forced them from England. Priestley's plans for his sons to inherit Wilkinson's ironworks evaporated; in America, efforts to establish manufactories, colonies, farms, and a college miscarried. Cooper taught college chemistry, but his materialism provoked dismissals. The Du Ponts were unlikely founders of an industrial-chemistry empire. Du Pont's philosophy promulgated that agriculture, not industry, produced wealth. Eleuthère-Irénée apprenticed in France's gunpowder administration, however, plans for his succession died and director Antoine Lavoisier, a family friend, was executed. E.-I. and Du Pont's arrest precipitated relocation to America. Du Pont's utopian colony and schemes proved unrealistic. Nevertheless, E.-I.'s gunpowder manufactory-utilizing transatlantic contacts and privileged knowledge of advanced French chemistry-succeeded through practical application.

The Scottish Enlightenment has long been identified with abolitionism because of the writings of the moral and economic philosophers and the absence of slaves in Scotland itself. However, Scots were disproportionately represented in the ownership, management, and especially medical treatment of slaves in the British Caribbean. Sugar and cotton flowed into Glasgow and young, educated Scots looking for work as traders, bookkeepers, doctors made the return trip back to the Caribbean to manage the plantations. Chemically trained doctors and agriculturalists tested their theories in the plantations and developed new theories based on their experimentation on the land and slaves. In foregrounding the participation of Scottish trained chemists in the practice of slavery, I argue that the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade.

This article reveals how nineteenth-century chemists and health reformers tried to eradicate the use of yeast in bread, claiming they had devised healthier and more sanitary ways to raise bread. It describes the alternative technological solutions to baking bread, investigating factors that influenced their development and adaptation in the marketplace. A lack of scientific and cultural consensus surrounding yeast, what it was and what it did, fermented during this period. The conflict over yeast helped create a heterogeneous industrialization of the baking industry, changing processes and ingredients and creating new forms of bakery products. By examining the claims of promoters of rival scientific beliefs and technologies, as well as those of users and social commentators, we can see that technology's eventual adaptation and impact on society is not predictable at its outset. Exploring the relationship between differing scientific beliefs, cultural understandings and alternative technologies also shows how science and industry cannot be isolated from their social and cultural context. The examination of the nineteenth-century technological development of commonplace commodities such as bread, baking powder and yeast, also reveals and explores a story that has not been told before in the history of science and technology. Why it has not been told is as enlightening as the story itself, revealing as it does our own privileging of what is important in science and history.

In this paper I will probe into Herman Boerhaave's (1668-1738) appropriation of Isaac Newton's natural philosophy. It will be shown that Newton's work served multiple purposes in Boerhaave's oeuvre, for he appropriated Newton's work differently in different contexts and in different episodes in his career. Three important episodes in, and contexts of, Boerhaave's appropriation of Newton's natural philosophical ideas and methods will be considered: 1710-11, the time of his often neglected lectures on the place of physics in medicine; 1715, when he delivered his most famous rectorial address; and, finally, 1731/2, in publishing his Elementa chemiae. Along the way, I will spell out the implications of Boerhaave's case for our understanding of the reception, or use, of Newton's ideas more generally.

This paper presents some of Santorio's marginalia to his Commentaria in primam fen primi libri Canonis Avicennae (Venice, 1625), which I identified in the Sloane Collection of the British Library in 2016, as well as the evidence for their authorship. The name of the Venetian physician Santorio Santori (1561-1636) is linked with the introduction of quantification in medicine and with the invention of precision instruments that, displayed for the first time in this work, laid down the foundations for what we today understand as evidence-based medicine. But Santorio's monumentale opus also contains evidence of many quantified experiments and displays his ideas on mixtures, structure of matter and corpuscles, which are in many cases clarified and completed by the new marginalia. These ideas testify to an early interest in chemistry within the Medical School of Padua which predates both Galileo and Sennert and which has hitherto been unknown.

This article considers how chemical analyses were employed not only to study and describe mineral waters, but also to promote new spas, and to reinforce the scientific authority of experts. Scientists, jointly with bath owners, visitors and local authorities, created a significant spa market by transforming rural spaces into social and economic sites. The paper analyses the role developed by the chemist Antonio Casares in the commodification of mineral water in mid-19(th) century Spain. His scientific publications and water analyses put a new economic value on some Spanish mineral waters and rural springs. First the paper explores the relationship between geographic factors, regulation, and spa development in 19(th) century Spain, and considers how scientific work improved the economy of some rural areas. Then the transformation of numerous country springs into spas, and the commodification of baths as places between science and leisure is examined. Finally the location of spas across the borders of medicine and chemistry is shown, together with the complex field operations required to study mineral waters. This paper reveals an intense circulation of knowledge between the field, laboratories and scientific publications, as well as the essential role developed by experts like Casares, who not only contributed to the study of rural springs but also to their economic transformation.

Eighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition (dictionaries, grammars and other helpful materials, such as translated works in both languages), texts acquisition and dissemination (including author's additions and corrections, oral presentations in academic meetings and announcements of forthcoming translations). The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements (Collection académique, 1755-79) or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts (Guyton de Morveau's 'Bureau de traduction de Dijon', devoted to chemistry and mineralogy, 1781-90). That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts (colour, odour, shape of crystals, etc.) with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation - with both the experiments and the translations - the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation.

This article follows the publication strategies of the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848). It focuses on the role of language and translation in Berzelius' efforts to strengthen his own reputation, and that of Swedish science. As an author and editor, Berzelius encouraged the translation of his own works into several languages, while endeavouring to preserve the status of Swedish as a language of scientific publication in the face of French, and increasingly German and English, dominance. Reforming the Transactions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and launching several new scientific periodicals, Berzelius also attempted to influence the publication practices in other countries. Recent scholarship on the history of scientific publication has drawn attention to the practical difficulties of determining and getting hold of the relevant publications in one's field, the 'malleability' of the journal medium, and the common practice of reprinting and summarising papers published elsewhere. Berzelius' publication strategies highlight translation - time-consuming, unreliable and problematic in terms of authorisation and ownership - as one aspect of the wider problem of communicating across national and linguistic boundaries. Berzelius' struggles with the practicalities of communicating across borders in times of war, the choice of language and its consequences, and national standards of publication, demonstrate the importance of a transnational perspective on the history of scientific publication.

This paper explores the history of the isolation and industrial production of aluminium in France, from the work of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville in the 1850s to the latter part of the twentieth century, focusing on the relationships between academic research and industrial exploitation. In particular, it identifies a culture and organisation of research and development, "learning-by-doing," that emerged in the French aluminium industry following the establishment of the first electrolytic production facilities in the late 1880s by Paul Héroult, who, along with the American Charles Hall, patented the electrolytic method of producing the metal. This French method of R&D was a product both of a scientific culture that saw a continuity between scientific research and industrial application, and of a state policy that, unlike in Germany or the United States, was late to recognise the importance of fostering, on a large scale, the relations between academic chemistry and industry. It was only after World War II that the French state came fully to recognise the importance of underpinning industry with scientific research. And it was only from the 1960s, in the face of intensifying global competition, the risks of pollution, and the cost of energy, that the major aluminium firm Pechiney et Cie was able to replace a culture of "learning-by-doing" by one that integrated fundamental science with the production process.

This paper's primary goal is to compare the personalities, values, and influence of August Wilhelm Hofmann and Emil Fischer as exemplars and acknowledged leaders of successive generations of the German chemical profession and as scientists sharing a 19th-century liberal, internationalist outlook from the German wars of unification in the 1860s to Fischer's death in 1919 in the aftermath of German defeat in World War I. The paper will consider the influence of Hofmann and Fischer on the shaping of national scientific institutions in Germany, from founding of the German Chemical Society in 1867 to the first institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society founded in 1911, their academic leadership in other areas including the shaping of a successful academic-industrial symbiosis in organic chemistry, and finally their response to war as a force disruptive of scientific internationalism. All of these developments posed serious dilemmas, exacerbated by emerging strains of nationalism and anti-Semitism in German society. Whereas Hofmann's lifework came to a relatively successful end in 1892, Fischer was not so fortunate, as the war brought him heavy responsibilities and terrible personal losses, but with no German victory and no peace of reconciliation--a bleak end for Fischer and the 19th-century liberal ideals that had inspired him.

This essay challenges the often expressed view that the principles of metals, namely mercury and sulphur, were generally viewed by alchemists as being of a 'metaphysical' character that made them inaccessible to the tools and operations of the laboratory. By examining a number of Arabo-Latin and Latin alchemical texts in circulation before the end of the thirteenth century, the author presents evidence that most alchemists of the period considered mercury and sulphur to be materials subject to techniques of purification in the same way that naturally occurring salts and minerals could be freed of their impurities or dross. The article also points to the immense influence of Avicenna and Albertus Magnus in formulating the theory that mercury and sulphur were compounds of different materials, containing both fixed and unfixed components. Finally, the author briefly examines the relationship between this materialist approach to the principles and the chymical atomism of early modern authors who were deeply aware of medieval alchemical literature.

This paper explores diverse conceptions of the physicality and tangibility of elements and principles in early modern chymistry. By tracing the development of natural philosophical and corpuscular ideas about material elements and principles among several physicans and chymists, including Thomas Erastus, Andreas Libavius, Daniel Sennert, and Anton Günther Billich, this article locates a learned tradition that developed predominantly in Germany, and which directly challenged a common understanding of matter held by major Paracelsians as well as authors from the French textbook tradition. Likewise, conceptions of incorporeal elements or principles are shown to have developed from the ideas of Paracelsus and Petrus Severinus, whereas authors in the learned tradition emphasised a particular interpretation of Aristotle. The article concludes by suggesting that chymical interpretations of material composition had an important influence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that this provides further evidence that the so-called "compositional revolution" in chemistry was well underway prior to the eighteenth century.

In the eighteenth century, many chemists asserted that chemical operations could not decompose a substance into its natural, constituent elements or principles. One such chemist was Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), who claimed, following the work of Robert Boyle and Joan Baptista van Helmont, that examples of these alleged analyses were, in fact, not reductions of a body into elements, but rather the rearrangement of its particles by the fire. Since we cannot observe the shape and arrangement of particles directly, he reasoned, any claim regarding the elemental status of a substance was purely speculative and inadmissible in his chemistry. As a result, Boerhaave devised a system of chemistry which, in effect, accepted no elemental substances and which focused on understanding how the chemist's 'instruments,' including fire and chemical menstrua, effected changes in matter. I conclude by showing how Boerhaave's conclusion had ramifications for later developments in chemistry, especially those of the French Stahlians and of Antione Lavoisier.

The synthesis of phosphors, or light-bearing matter, figured largely among the activities of early scientific societies and within the first scientific journals. They were prestige objects during the formative institutionalisation of experimental natural philosophy. Nevertheless, early phosphors have often appeared within the historiography of chemistry as a throwback to an earlier era. They have been represented as a fundamental epistemic and theoretical divide between a mystical alchemy (exemplified by Christian Adolph Balduin) and modern chemistry (prefigured by progressives such as Robert Boyle). The parallel phosphoric researches of Boyle and Balduin belie this divide. Recovering the theoretical context of Balduin's phosphor can both resituate it in relation to phosphoric research of the 1670s and 1680s, as well as further illuminate the intellectual sources and development of chymical atomism.

Patterns of collaboration and co-authorship in chemical science from the 1920s to the 1960s are examined with an eye to frequency of co-authorship and differences in allocation of credit during a period of increasing team research and specialization within chemical research groups. Three research leaders in the cross-disciplinary and cutting edge field of X-ray crystallography and molecular structure are the focus of this historical study within a framework of sociological literature on different collaborative patterns followed by eminent scientists. The examples of Michael Polanyi in Berlin and Manchester, Linus Pauling in Pasadena, and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in Oxford demonstrate the need to de-centre historical narrative from the heroic 'he' or 'she' to the collaborative 'they.' These cases demonstrate, too, the roles of disciplinary apprenticeships, local conditions, and individual personalities for historical explanation that transcends universal generalizations about scientific practice, material culture, and sociological trends.

This paper compares the affinity theories and the associated affinity diagrams of William Cullen (1710-1790) and George Fordyce (1736-1802), exploring in particular one episode that took place during the brief hiatus between Fordyce's student years at Edinburgh University and the start of his own pedagogical career in London. This investigation complements that contained in Part I of this paper, which compared the chemistry courses given by Cullen and Fordyce, demonstrating that the knowledge originally imparted to Fordyce by Cullen in his Edinburgh lectures was augmented and translated by Fordyce for his own pedagogical purposes. Part II offers greater insight into the flow of knowledge between Fordyce and Cullen. Their correspondence suggests that the relationship between master and student transmuted into something more complicated after Fordyce left Edinburgh, while the model of knowledge transmission between the two can be seen to be more collaborative than might be expected.

This paper focuses on one site of chemistry that served multiple functions over its lifetime and played a pivotal role in the development of British pharmaceutical manufacturing. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Society of Apothecaries' premises in Blackfriars housed the largest pharmaceutical manufacturing laboratories in London and supplied drugs for use throughout the British Empire. Under the guidance of William Brande, the laboratories developed as sites of teaching, research and consultancy, activities which shaped the Society's public image and enhanced its commercial, regulatory and professional roles. However, as competition from other pharmaceutical firms increased, inherent contradictions in the Society's various remits, combined with its conservative approach to business, meant that there was no clear direction for the laboratories' development. In an era of growing specialisation, this multifunctional site became increasingly outdated by the end of the nineteenth century.

This article contributes to a growing body of research on the dissemination, dispersion or diffusion of scientific knowledge via pedagogical networks. By examining students' handwritten lecture notes, I compare the eighteenth-century chemistry lectures given by William Cullen (1710-1790) at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities with those of his one-time student George Fordyce (1736-1802), in London, at first privately and then as part of the medical education of physicians at St. Thomas's Hospital. Part I examines the broad structure of Cullen's and Fordyce's courses, comparing both course content and pedagogical approaches to ask how far knowledge flowed directly 'downstream,' and the extent to which it was transformed, translated or transmuted in the process of transmission. Part II (forthcoming) will approach the affinity theories of Cullen and Fordyce in greater depth, revealing the dynamics of knowledge transfer. The results shed light on the transmission of knowledge and skills between master and student, and reflect on whether Fordyce can be better described as Cullen's pedagogical progeny, or less straightforwardly as a tactical translator.

In the course of the 18th century a new type of scientifically educated functional elites developed, who were trained to administer mines. The educational project that led to the formation of a corps of mining engineers was part of a programme of administrative and economic reforms that led to a new configuration of bonds between state, economy and science. At the same time the status of this new group of experts was predicated substantially by the new emerging corpora of the scientific, technological and cameralist knowledge of the period between 1760 and 1800. The aim of this paper is to discuss this group using the example of a leading expert in the context of the mining and metallurgy of this period. Anton von Ruprecht (1748-1814) was strongly grounded in the social and epistemic context of the Habsburg mining bureaucracy, which employed his scientific and technical savoir faire to serve their mercantile goals in several areas of mining expertise.

Pierre-Joseph Macquer (1718-1784) is well known as one of the major chemists in the eighteenth century as a theoretician and a teacher. He is also known for his works on dyeing. This paper presents a new face of Macquer. He proposed a theory on mordants in dyeing as early as 1775. Besides his activity at the Académie des sciences, he played an important role in Government as the commissioner of dyeing from 1766 where he established close links with artisan inventors. Académicien chimiste at the royal Manufactory of Sèvres from 1757, he was also the inventor of French porcelain. His notebooks show his organization, method, courage, passion and obstinacy in the search for the paste for hard porcelain. He also proposed an interpretation of its formation. Macquer was both a theoretician and a practical expert in dyeing as well as in porcelain making. He managed to bridge the gap between science and art.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Prussian State supported savants who combined learned inquiry into nature with technical work. Members of the physical and mathematical classes of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences were involved in State projects such as surveying for the construction of canals, chemical analysis of Silesian iron, production of porcelain and of beet sugar. Some of these men were truly 'hybrid' experts living both in the worlds of State-directed manufacture and academic natural inquiry. Among these savant experts there was a particular sub-group that is at the centre of this paper: mining officials who were also recognized as mineralogists, geologists and chemists. The paper describes and analyses the training and the varied technical and scientific activities of these 'savant officials'. At the centre of attention are the travels of inspection of the mineralogist and mining official Carl Abraham Gerhard (1738-1821) in the late 1760s. I argue that Gerhard's travels of inspection were at the same time geological travels and that savant officials like Gerhard made a significant contribution to the fledgling science of geology.

Franciscus dele Boë (1614-1672), known as Sylvius, was one of the foremost chymical physicians of the mid-seventeenth century. He developed a highly influential and equally controversial theory of chymistry and physiology based on the interaction of acids and alkalis, taught students from across Europe, and performed and guided experimental research on digestion, glands, respiration, and the motion of the heart. Throughout his work, Sylvius grounded his knowledge of the acid and alkali chymical principles in the practice of tasting. In this paper, I expand our knowledge of Sylvius's chymistry and recover the surprising extent and significance of his use of his senses to assay chymical substances. I compare the uses of taste in more traditional Galenic medicine and the emerging chymistry in order to argue that Sylvius's reliance on taste grew directly out of his favoured chymical traditions. Looking to the broader context of philosophical medicine also allows us to see Sylvius's explicit commitment to Cartesian matter theory as an ideal: a metaphysical dream that he accepted yet criticised for its poor fit with the hard work and bodily experience central to proper chymistry and medicine.

This paper is based on the archaeological and analytical study of the laboratory remains from the Officina Chimica of the Old Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Following a contextualisation of this laboratory, founded in the wake of Bacon's utopian idea of Solomon's Temple, it is argued that the assemblage is likely to date from the late seventeenth century and thus be connected to the work of Robert Plot, Christopher White, and, indirectly, Robert Boyle. The analytical study of the equipment reveals that the chymists at the Old Ashmolean obtained crucibles from the best manufacturers in Europe, and that they used these and other utensils for experiments involving mercury, sulphur, zinc, lead glass, manganese, and antimony. The importance of these elements for early modern chymistry is discussed in the light of relevant historical sources, including some of Boyle's chymical texts. Altogether, these finds illustrate some of the rich diversity of experiments that took place in one of the most prominent laboratories of the period, showing strong connections with longstanding alchemical concerns as well as with cutting-edge research and development ventures.

Throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, many distinguished chemists attributed an important, at times crucial, role to the historical narrative. When the first professional histories were published during the nineteenth century, their role was intimately interwoven with the identity of chemistry, a science that in spite (or because) of its rapidly growing importance in the industrialisation of Europe, did not have the same reputation as either the exact sciences or the medical-biological disciplines. With the works by Berthelot, Lippmann, and Mieli, the history of chemistry focused on its rich and varied documentary sources. The histories of chemistry produced during this period set the ground for a variety of approaches that reflect, to a large degree, the main currents of old and recent history of science. Moreover, historians of chemistry, both continental and Anglo-American, had a prominent role in establishing the history of science as an independent discipline.

This paper defines the history of recent chemistry, and then charts the disappearance of the history of recent chemistry ("how we got here" history) from general histories of chemistry by the late 1930s. It is also shown how the history of recent chemistry in the early decades of the twentieth century was very much the history of physical chemistry. The revival of the history of recent chemistry is attributed to Eduard Farber and Aaron lhde. Several attempts have been made since the early 1980s to promote the history of recent chemistry, with mixed results. The current situation is assessed, and the paper concludes with a proposal for the entrenchment of the subject.

The article uses the recently deposited archives of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry to explore the ideas, motives and disagreements of its founders and officers between 1935 and 1960. The origin of the title Ambix for the society's journal is also explained. An appendix identifies the initial membership of the society.

The purpose of this work is to translate some of Robert Boyle's chemical experiments into the terms of modern chemistry. Most of the reactions involve sensible qualities, since there are on it considerable helpful tracking descriptions like heating, hissing, colour changing, etc. For a long time in the history of science, this procedure was seen as an exercise in anachronism which should be avoided at all costs. Recently many scholars have demonstrated that chemical translation can assist with historical work instead of causing confusion, and it may be very useful as a tool for the history of chemistry and for reproducing past chemical experiments.

Samuel Cottereau Du Clos (1598-1685) appears as the first French chemist to combine in chemistry (for him, the science of substances, the physics of qualities) demonstrations using the laws of motion with demonstrations using the qualities of chemical principles. In this way, he brought to bear two different and complementary orders of explanation. According to Du Clos, the mechanical considerations represent a first approach, a stage towards the knowledge of "the truth of things" (la vérité des choses) in natural philosophy. He set out his chemistry at the Académie royale des sciences de Paris, especially through his criticism of Boyle's Certain Physiological Essays in 1668-1669.

A striking omission in the scholarship on the reception of the chymical philosophy of Jan Baptista van Helmont in England in the seventeenth century is the work of the mid-seventeenth-century natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. In her Philosophical Letters (1664), Cavendish offers an extended critique of Van Helmont's work (whose Ortus Medicince had recently been translated into English by John Sadler). In this paper, I compare Cavendish's criticisms with those of Robert Boyle in his Sceptical Chymist (1661). Both Boyle and Cavendish attacked Van Helmont for the obscurity of his chymical vocabulary and concepts, and attacked his seminalism. Although their critiques had much in common, they diverged in their attitudes to Van Helmont's experiments. As an opponent of the experimental philosophy, Cavendish had little interest in the quality of Van Helmont's experimental claims, whereas Boyle was critical of their unreplicability. I also try to show that the two writers had very different polemical agendas, with Boyle defending his vision of chymistry based on a corpuscularian natural philosophy, and Cavendish being as much concerned with establishing her religious orthodoxy as with defending the truth claims of her own materialist vitalism. For Cavendish, Van Helmont was an example of the dangers of mingling theology and natural philosophy.

A letter by Lucien Herr, a highly regarded leading French intellectual at the time of World War I, provides capsule portraits of chemists such as Gabriel Bertrand, Paul Lebeau, Charles Moureu, and Georges Urbain. It makes us better aware of who they were and of how their contemporaries saw their work, which had much to do with their personalities, whether congenial or abrasive. This article is concerned with the kind of information carried by the so-called grapevine. It can be invaluable to the historian, for the light it sheds on the character of a scientist. The document drawn upon, from World War I (1915), depicts graphically the personalities of some of the French chemists engaged in the rush to design and produce chemical weapons. It is a frank and even brutal appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses. This is the kind of evaluation that scientists routinely engage in, but devoid of the hyperbole, pro or con, which usually flavours it.

The last two decades of the ancien régime saw a rapid growth in the number of chemistry courses being offered in Paris. These courses were central to the continuing popularisation of chemistry, but they played an equally important role in the development of a large and dynamic community of chemical practitioners in Paris. They indicate that this community was undergoing major changes: rapid growth that challenged the position and authority of the Académie; expanding opportunities for making a career in and around the teaching of chemistry; new ways of organising research; a change in the relationship between pharmacy and chemistry; and the emergence of new forms of scientific sociability. These developments pre-date the chemical and political revolutions, and provide the context for a broader understanding of both the Chemical Revolution and the politically contested history of chemistry during the Revolution and Empire.

In this article, I argue that chemical lectures at universities played a crucial role in the establishment of chemistry as a well-defined science in Germany around 1800. In particular, lecture demonstrations served to secure the facticity of facts. This was important, because the concept of the chemical fact was at the centre of the prevailing epistemology, which itself partly reflected the social order of chemistry as a science in Germany, and partly served to foster it. In the dialectic constellation of research and teaching, professor-chemists took the lead in the social and epistemological definition of chemistry.

This article is concerned with the public courses and lecture demonstrations given by Louis Jacques Thenard at the College de France during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The expectations and needs of Thenard's auditors will be studied in order to understand the role played by chemistry courses at the College in the context of the growing and changing Parisian teaching market during the first third of the nineteenth century. The preparation and performance of lecture demonstrations was the main driving force of several major changes in the premises and the personnel associated with the chair of chemistry. Our analysis of the parallel process of expansion and functional differentiation of spaces and personnel will show the multiple interactions taking place between the research and teaching activities developed by Thenard and his team of assistants and students.

Outside formal university chemistry classes in Scotland, which existed mainly to fulfil the requirements of medical courses, chemistry teaching was available from extramural lecturers. This form of teaching was often aimed at medical students, who could fulfil their graduation requirements if the lecturer had approved status. However, most of those attending would not have been seeking any formal qualification: there was a wave of enthusiasm among people from many walks of life about gaining chemical knowledge. Audiences included fashionable gentlefolk, manufacturers and industrialists, apprentice surgeons, mechanics, and artisans. Much of the teaching was at a highly proficient level, chemists of the stature of Thomas Thomson, Andrew Ure, Andrew Fyfe, Edward Turner, William Gregory, Thomas Graham, David Boswell Reid and George Wilson all offering classes. For several such teachers, it was the first step in a career that would later lead to significant academic or governmental appointments. In an Appendix, the article lists forty-eight chemists who have been identified as having taught extramurally between the later eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, chemistry was the object of spectacular public infatuation. Each course was specialised, depending on its particular audience. In order to meet the range of expectations of its diverse public, chemistry taught in France during this period combined apprenticeship and growing theoretical sophistication, while at the same time remaining popular and spectacular. The analysis of manuscript notes taken by Rouelle's, Venel's and Macquer's students reveals an innovative chemistry, based on experiment, in which theory and practice went hand in hand. The experimental approach was based on the widespread use of Geoffroy's affinity table, which made it possible to both interpret and predict operations.