The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

The breathing of animals and the burning of substances were supposed to load the atmosphere with phlogiston. Priestley spoke of the atmosphere as being constantly "vitiated," "rendered noxious," "depraved," or "corrupted" by processes of respiration and combustion; he called those processes whereby the atmosphere is restored to its original condition (or "depurated," as he said), "dephlogisticating processes." As he had obtained his dephlogisticated air by heating the calx of mercury, that is the powder produced by calcining mercury in the air, Priestley was forced to suppose that the calcination of mercury in the air must be a more complex occurrence than merely the expulsion of phlogiston from the mercury: for, if the process consisted only in the expulsion of phlogiston, how could heating what remained produce exceedingly pure ordinary air? It seemed necessary to suppose that not only was phlogiston expelled from mercury during calcination, but that the mercury also imbibed some portion, and that the purest portion, of the surrounding air. Priestley did not, however, go so far as this; he was content to suppose that in some way, which he did not explain, the process of calcination resulted in the loss of phlogiston by the mercury, and the gain, by the dephlogisticated mercury, of the property of yielding exceedingly pure or dephlogisticated air when it was heated very strongly. Priestley thought of properties in much the same way as the alchemists thought of them, as wrappings, or coverings of an essential something, from which they can be removed and around which they can again be placed. The protean principle of phlogiston was always at hand, and, by skilful management, was ready to adapt itself to any facts. Before the phenomena of combustion could be described accurately, it was necessary to do two things; to ignore the theory of phlogiston, and to weigh and measure all the substances which take part in some selected processes of burning.