Lavoisier

1780 · 1466 — Paris: Hotel de Thou rue des Poitevins 1780. LAVOISIER'S OFFICIAL EASTER MEMOIR ON THE COMPOSITION OF AIR. THIS IS THE 1780 edition. WE OFFER THE 1st 1778 EDITION SEPARATELY. <br /> <br /> In this work Lavoisier proposed that ordinary air is composed of two different gases one "highly respirable" that he named "oxygen" and the other later named nitrogen that was unable to support combustion or respiration. This work is commonly referred to as Lavoisier's "Easter Memoir" because he presented an earlier version to the Academy around Easter of 1775; as this is the 1778 revised version historians regard it as Lavoisier's "official" Easter Memoir Wikipedia. <br /> <br /> In April 1778 "Lavoisier read for a second time the memoir in which he had originally demonstrated in April 1775 that mercury precipitate reduced without charcoal disengages not fixed air but the ‘air itself entire' or ‘the purest portion of the air'. He made some revisions in the text that have attracted widespread attention from historians" Holmes Lavoisier 137. <br /> <br /> In the time between 1775 and 1778 Lavoisier repeated some of performed some new experiments of his own and repeated some of Priestley's. In the 1778 ‘official' version Lavoisier "altered the language in which he had described that air calling it now ‘the most salubrious the most pure portion of the air' and air ‘in an eminently respirable state'. Fastening on to this last phrase he again referred to the air later in his memoir as ‘eminently respirable air'. At the same time he deleted references to it in the original version as ‘common air' and eliminated the experimental description that it reacted to the nitrous air test in the same manner as common air. <br /> <br /> "Historians have tended to treat with suspicion the textual changes Lavoisier made. The implication seems to be that he sought to represent himself as having clearly understood in 1775 that the air released from the mercury calx is a specific portion of the atmosphere when in fact he had then still not distinguished it unambiguously from ordinary air. If one couples this suspicion with acceptance of Priestley's charge that Lavoisier had obtained the idea for the experiment from him in the first place then one creates an image of Lavoisier as one who is known to have had an ‘occasional tendency to allow the work of others to pass as his own'. <br /> <br /> "There is however no solid evidence that in making these changes he was attempting to rewrite history. His motivation was probably simple. By the spring of 1778 when his new theoretical edifice had solidified the experiments on mercury calx would have come to appear to him as one of the decisive experimental foundations on which he had erected it. Yet when he looked back on the paper which reported these experiments from the vantage point he had since attained the descriptions of the air he had identified in it would have appeared confused ambiguous and inconsistent. <br /> <br /> "The embarrassment of allowing such flaws to remain in what he could now anticipate might someday be regarded as a classic paper is obvious. Since the paper had yet to appear in the Memoirs of the Academy chronically two to three years late in publication he had a convenient opportunity to avoid that outcome" Holmes. CONDITION: Paris: Hotel de Thou rue des Poitevins. 8vo. 6.5 x 4. 12 folding engraved copperplates. Marbled endpapers. Contemporary full leather binding. Chipped in several places. Internally fine. Hotel de Thou, rue des Poitevins hardcover