From Phlogiston to Caloric and Oxygen

Arthur Donovan, Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution. Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. Pp. xv+351. £35.00. ISBN 0-631-178877-2 Arthur Donovan marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) with a historical biography for readers who are already acquainted with the technical and scientific aspects of the Chemical Revolution and wish to know more of Lavoisier’s principal career as an administrator and financier in the terminal decades of the ancien regime and the opening years of the French Revolution. Although Lavoisier was a driven experimental scientist from his early days, and soon became wealthy enough to run a well-equipped laboratory with assistants, he was far too busy with technocratic administration to carry out much practical chemistry. His primary scientific strength lay in a critical assessment of the promise offered by new experimental results, discovered by other chemists, for some alternative to prevailing chemical ideas, which he had come to regard in youth as inadequate and flawed from a wide knowledge of the state of the art and a judicious repetition of previous experiments.