ABSTRACT
Gabriel Franois Venel contributed close to 200 essays, and wrote on some of the most fundamental topics in contemporary chemistry. The beginning of the latter third of the eighteenth century, a period which came to be dominated by the chemical revolution, Lewis's way of defining chemistry Vis--Vis natural philosophy and the physical seems almost prophetic when considered in light of traditional chemists' reaction to Lavoisier's reformation. Venel had been a student of Guillaume Franois Rouelle, an important disseminator of Stahlian ideas in France, and teacher of Lavoisier and Diderot, among others. His lamentations, directed at chemists and physicists alike, convey the features of chemistry's mid-century disciplinary crisis. Venel's goal was to redescribe the tree of theoretical and practical knowledge or the tree 'des sciences, des arts et des mtiers', as the title of the Encyclopdie suggests. Linking concepts like aggregate and homogeneity to the chemical subject matter, Venel presented a hierarchical ontology, starting with the claim that aggregates are homogeneous.
