ABSTRACT
This chapter traces Priestley's early production and manipulation of nitrous air in relation to his evolving understanding of its constitution and nature, to clarify the interplay between matter theory and experimental method in pneumatic chemistry. It analyses his experimentalism to his metaphysical and epistemological views, depicting his pneumatic activity as it unfolded at the intersection of chemical method experimental and literary and epistemology. Priestley's scientific image has been repeatedly cast and reinterpreted by modern commentators. Numerous scholars have offered alternative interpretations of Priestley's scientific enterprise and its central feature the chemical study of airs. Priestley's experimental method clearly owes something to his avid interest in engaging in the practice of experimental philosophy and to insert his own discoveries into the expanding public culture of science. Lavoisier's algebraic vision of chemistry and his grammatical understanding of nature have supplanted Priestley's buoyant intimation that nature is a rich mine, in which one shall never dig in vain.
