The first history of chemistry / by John Ferguson.

  • Ferguson, John, 1838-1916.
Date:
[1886]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The first history of chemistry / by John Ferguson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The first History of Chemistry. By John Ferguson, M.A., Professor of Chemistry in the University of Glasgow. [Eead before the Society, 6th January, 1S86.] § 1.—Next to the interest of tracing the growth of the science of chemistry by its history, is that of observing how this history was regarded at particular epochs; that is, of observing Iioav the development of historical views kept pace with that of the science itself. The history of any period in chemistry must always be coloured more or less by the ideas current at the time of its writing; it must be tacitly or professedly a consideration and narrative, if not a criticism, of past events from the standpoint of a later time, while necessarily limited by that time. The historian, indeed, can hardly be in line with, much less venture to transcend, the most novel discoveries and hypotheses of his contemporaries, he must take up his position on what seem to be the best established doctrines of his time. Thus, for example, while it was quite impossible that Bergman could have written a history of the events connected with oxygen—because for him they either had not come into existence at all, or else were just shaping themselves—it was equally impossible for him to have judged the alchemical period in the same way as was clone by Olaus Borrichius, a century earlier. For, during that century, discovery and theory and knowledge had greatly advanced, the period during which Bergman lived was no longer one in which a belief in the reality, or even possibility, of transmuta- tion prevailed, but was that of the much more comprehensive hypothesis of phlogiston, and he of necessity judged the past through the medium of that hypothesis. Or, to select a still more striking case, which the author about to be spoken of affords. If we compare the view of the Greek alchemical manuscripts taken three hundred years ago by the French chemist, Vallensis, with that in the work published this last year on the same subject by one of the leading French chemists of the present time, M. Berthelot, we shall see in how entirely different a manner the same topic is treated. It is not merely that Vallensis had not and could not have had the same knowledge, but