The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

For the undefined, ever-changing, protean essence, or soul, of a thing which the alchemists thought of as hidden by wrappings of properties, the exact investigations of Lavoisier, and those of others who worked on the same lines as he, substituted this definite, fixed, unmodifiable property of mass. Lavoisier, and those who followed in his footsteps, also did away with the alchemical notion of the existence of an essential substratum, independent of changes in those properties of a substance which can be observed by the senses. For the experimental researches of these men obliged naturalists to recognise, that a change in the properties of a definite, homogeneous substance, such as pure water, pure chalk, or pure sulphur, is accompanied (or, as we generally say, is caused) by the formation of a new substance or substances; and this formation, this apparent creation, of new material, is effected, either by the addition of something to the original substance, or by the separation of it into portions which are unlike it, and unlike one another. If the change is a combination, or coalescence, of two things into one, then the mass, and hence the weight, of the product is equal to the sum of those masses, and hence those weights, of the things which have united to form it; if the change is a separation of one distinct substance into several substances, then the sum of the masses, and hence the weights, of the products is equal to that mass, and hence that weight, of the substance which has been separated.