Laws and order in eighteenth-century chemistry Book

The eighteenth century was the formative period in which chemistry established itself as an autonomous discipline with its own concepts and modes of explanation, independent of mathematical physics. Yet much previous writing in this area has concentrated on theories derived from more traditional fields such as physics. This book traces chemistry's transition from alchemy to its own branch of knowledge. It describes the growth of affinity tables, which chemists hoped would lead to the induction of predictive laws, and which represented their unofficial list of elements which eventually through the work of Lavoisier replaced the traditional Aristotelian list. The book also discusses chemists' efforts to account for double decomposition, to measure affinity or attraction quantitatively, to classify types of affinity and to state laws of chemistry. For science historians and philosophers and chemists with an interest in their field's origins, this book is a good recounting of chemistry's evolution as a legitimate field of science.