Abstract
Ideas about the structure of matter have always been investigated by both the physicist and the chemist, the former speculating about the fine structure of matter, the building up of its structure to make what we see, the latter about the behavior of matter in chemical operations. Until the seventeenth century these two aspects of the study of matter had little in common; but, in the course of the scientific revolution, both physicist and chemist learned to appreciate to some extent the advantages of a mutual apprehension of the interests and discoveries of the rational chemist and the natural philosopher. Although the two aspects are divided in the selections below, it will be obvious that some are only arbitrarily in one section or the other and could be moved without any significant disturbance.
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Notes
SOURCE: Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (London, 1620); translated by R. Ellis and James Speeding, Book II, aphorisms III, IV, XX.
SOURCE: Translated by the editor from René Descartes, Principia Philosophiae (Paris, 1647), sections 1, 4–22, 54–56, 61–63; part III, sections 48–52; part IV, sections 1–2, 14–16, 18–20, 22–23, 28–30, 133, 207.
SOURCE: Robert Boyle, The Excellency and Grounds of the Mechanical Hypothesis (London, 1674), taken from Peter Shaw’s abridgement (1725), II, 187–96.
SOURCE: Isaac Newton, Principia, The Conclusion; from A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: The University Press, 1962), pp. 334–44.
SOURCE: John Dalton, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, part I (London, 1808), pp. 211–16.
SOURCE: Christophe Glaser, Traité de la chymie (Paris, 1663); the text is that of the anonymous English translation, The Compleat Chymist, or A New Treatise of Chymistry (London, 1677).
SOURCE: Robert Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (1661), as printed in Thomas Birch, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (6 vols., London, 1772) I, 354–50.
SOURCE: Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (London, 1664), from the abridgement by Peter Shaw (1725), II, 86–88.
SOURCE: Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London, 1775), II, 29–61.
SOURCE: Translated by the editor from A. L. Lavoisier, “Mémoires sur la Respiration des Animaux et sur les changements qui arrivent a l’ air en passant par leur poumons” published in Mémoires de l’ Académie des sciences, Paris, 1777).
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© 1970 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hall, M.B. (1970). The Organization of Matter. In: Hall, M.B. (eds) Nature and Nature’s Laws. The Documentary History of Western Civilization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00469-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00469-0_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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