ABSTRACT

JAMES REILL, whom we have mentioned as an anatomist, translated Lemery’s Course of Chemistry in 1698, thereby introducing English chemists to the current theory of the relations of acids and alkalis1. But ten years before that time, J. J. Beecher of Mentz had died, and G. E. Stahl was following out his observations, which had already borne fruit2 in his Zymotechnia Fundamentalis, with a n ‘ experimentum novum sulphur verum arte producendi’ (1697), which resulted in the enuntiation of the theory of phlogiston, the terminology of which was retained or adapted even by our Cavendish and Priestley in England in the latter half of the succeeding century, when they had passed to more positive observations and discoveries of the composition of water, and oxygen gas.