The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

A chemical element was thought of by Lavoisier as "the actual term whereat analysis has arrived," a definite substance "which we cannot subdivide with our present knowledge," but not necessarily a substance which will never be divided. A compound was thought of by him as a definite substance which is always produced by the union of the same quantities of the same elements, and can be separated into the same quantities of the same elements. These conceptions were amplified and made more full of meaning by the work of many who came after Lavoisier, notably by John Dalton, who was born in 1766 and died in 1844. In Chapter I., I gave a sketch of the atomic theory of the Greek thinkers. The founder of that theory, who flourished about 500 B.C., said that every substance is a collocation of a vast number of minute particles, which are unchangeable, indestructible, and impenetrable, and are therefore properly called atoms; that the differences which are observed between the qualities of things are due to differences in the numbers, sizes, shapes, positions, and movements of atoms, and that the process which occurs when one substance is apparently destroyed and another is produced in its place, is nothing more than a rearrangement of atoms. The supposition that changes in the properties of substances are connected with changes in the numbers, movements, and arrangements of different kinds of minute particles, was used in a general way by many naturalists of the 17th and 18th centuries; but Dalton was the first to show that the data obtained by the analyses of compounds make it possible to determine the relative weights of the atoms of the elements.