Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/594

568 of the basis of oxygen with caloric. It is not, then, that the one statement, Stahlian or Lavoisierian, is false and the other true, but that both of them are distorted, because incomplete. Chemists nowadays are both Stahlian and Lavoisierian in their notions, or have regard both to energy and matter. But Lavoisierian ideas still interfere very little with our use of the Stahlian language. While we acknowledge that in the act of burning the combustible and the oxygen take equal part, just as in the act of falling the weight and the earth take equal part, yet in our common language we alike disregard the abundant atmosphere and abundant earth as being necessarily understood, and speak only of the energy of the combustible and of the weight, which burn and fall respectively. Whatever may be the fault of language, however, chemists do not omit to superpose the Lavoisierian on the Stahlian notion. They recognize fully that it is by the union of the combustible with oxygen that phlogiston is dissipated in the form of heat; and, further, that phlogiston can only be restored to the burnt combustible on condition of separating the combustible from the oxygen with which it has united, just as energy of position can only be restored to a fallen weight on condition of separating it to a distance from the surface on which it has fallen.

That Stahl and his followers regarded phlogiston as a material substance, if they did so regard it, should interfere no more with our recognition of the merit due to their doctrine, than the circumstance of Black and Lavoisier regarding caloric as a material substance, if they did so regard it, should interfere with our recognition of the merit due to the doctrine of latent heat. But, though defining phlogiston as the principle or matter of fire, it is not at all clear that the phlogistians considered this matter of fire as constituting a real body or ponderable substance; but rather that they thought and spoke of it as many philosophers nowadays think and speak of the electric fluid and luminiferous ether. The nondescript character, properly ascribable to phlogiston, is indicated by the following quotation taken from Macquer's "Élémens de Chymie Théorique" (1749). It must not, of course, be forgotten that the popular impression as to phlogiston having been conceived by its advocates as a material substance having a negative weight or levity, is erroneous, and is based on an innovation that was introduced during the struggling decadence of the phlogistic theory, and advocated more particularly by Lavoisier's subsequent colleague, Guyton de Morveau, in his "Dissertation sur le Phlogistique, considéré comme Corps grave, et par Rapport aux Changemens de Pesanteur qu'il produit dans les Corps auxquels il est uni" (1762). Macquer writes as follows:

"'Matter of the sun, or of light,' 'phlogiston,' 'fire,' 'sulphur-principle,' 'inflammable matter'—such are the names usually employed to designate the element fire. But no precise distinction appears to have been drawn between fire viewed as a principle in the composition of a body, and fire when it stands