Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 13: July to December, 1921
Boyle's views gained ground very slowly, but the progress of chemistry was hindered for a century by a false theory, the so-called phlogiston theory. According to this view, there is an inflammable principle - phlogiston - which escapes when a substance is burned. For instance, when a metal is burned, phlogiston escapes and a calx or earth remains; on which basis the metal is a compound of calx plus phlogiston, whence it would follow that in order to regenerate the metal, phlogiston must be supplied to the calx by heating with some substance (such as carbon) rich in phlogiston. This theory emphasized the fundamental similarity of all combustion processes, and to that extent was a good and useful hypothesis; but the picture it presented is almost the exact inverse of the real facts, for we now know that a metal in burning actually unites with oxygen, that the calx or oxide weighs more than the metal, and that the system as a whole has lost energy, mainly in the form of heat - all of these changes having to be reversed in order to regenerate the metal from the oxide. The phlogiston theory, despite its falsity, continued to prevail for a century, during which time it befogged the whole subject and paralyzed the advance of chemical philosophy; the net result being that, until nearly the end of the eighteenth century, the subject was as little clear as it had been a hundred years before, although it had in the meantime been enriched by many new observations of importance, and progress along experimental lines had been quickened by improved technique. This prevalence of a false theory, which hindred progress so greatly, leads one to wonder if some of the hypotheses now commonly accepted do not have a similar inverse relation to the real facts, as was the case with the phlogiston theory; it is this type of question which the promoters of the theory of relativity are in effect asking with respect to our funda mental physical ideas. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
