Carbonic acid in medicine / by Achilles Rose, M.D. ; with the portraits of van Helmont, Priestley and Lavoisier.

  • Achilles Rose
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Carbonic acid in medicine / by Achilles Rose, M.D. ; with the portraits of van Helmont, Priestley and Lavoisier. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    62/288 (page 42)
    In 1800, when he confessed himself all but alone in his opinions, he published his last book, ''The Doctrine of Phlogiston Estab- lished. In his last papers he replied to Noah Webster and Erasmus Darwin, attacking the theory of spontaneous generation and of evolu- tion. Priestley's eminent discoveries in chemistry were due to an extraordinary quickness and keenness of imagination combined with no mean logical ability and manipulative skill. But, owing mainly to lack of adequate training, he failed to apprehend to the full the true value of his great results. Carelessness and haste, not want of critical power, led him at the outset to follow the retrograde view of Stahl rather than the method of Boyle, Black, and Caven- dish. Priestley is unjust to himself in attribu- ting most of his discoveries to chance. His researches offer admirable examples of scientific induction. He has been called by Cuvier **a father of modern chemistry . . . who would never acknowledge his daughter. Lavoisier upset the phlogiston theory of [42]