Beschreibung:

CHEMISTRY] LAVOISIER, ANTOINE LAURENT. Traité élémentaire de chimie, présenté dans un ordre nouveau et d'après les découvertes modernes par M. Lavoisier . Paris: Cuchet, 1789. The revised edition, published the same year as the first edition. Three volumes, three-quarters French mottled calf of the period, all edges red. xliv, 322 pp.; viii, 326 pp.; iv, 259 pp., with the large folding table of chemical nomenclature and 13 folding engravings by Marie-Anne-Paulze Lavoisier (lacking the final blank). Heads of spines a bit worn, front joint of the first volume starting, generally a very clean copy in unsophisticated state, lacking the terminal blank in the last volume. This is the first issue of the second edition (there was also a pirated issue of the text by Boiste, in which the plates were not drawn by Madame Lavoisier). This work laid the foundations of modern chemistry, and (among many other significant accomplishments) it sounded the death-knell of the phlogiston theory, hypothesizing that combustion involved a new element Lavoisier christened "Oxygen." Others, including Priestley, had previously isolated the gas, but Lavoisier went further in comprehending its key role in inorganic chemistry. Lavoisier himself was executed in 1794; his wife, herself an accomplished chemist, continued her career though with some vicissitudes. She was briefly married to the physicist Benjamin Thompson Count Rumford. PMM 238 (for the first edition); Horblit 64. C