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  • Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution
  • J. B. Gough (bio)
Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution. By Mi Gyung Kim. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xii+599. $55.

Not so very long ago, accounts of the revolution that made chemistry a modern science centered almost entirely on the careers of Antoine Lavoisier and a few British pneumatic chemists such as Joseph Black and Joseph Priestley. French chemists other than Lavoisier were seldom given more than subsidiary roles, either as opponents of the antiphlogistic chemistry or as belated converts to Lavoisier's views. Lavoisier himself had been insistent in claiming sole paternity for "his" revolution, and historians seemed largely to agree.

All that has now changed. In the past several decades investigations into the development of chemistry prior to Lavoisier have concluded that there existed a flourishing culture of chemical research that was undeniably modern. For example, chemists had already delineated effective means of determining the composition of the so-called middle or neutral salts, compounds of acids with alkalis, metals, and earths. They were increasingly adept at distinguishing salts that seemed to resemble one another, and, when new acids were discovered, they were able to generate new classes of salts by analogy with those already found.

Mi Gyung Kim goes over this ground, but in greater detail than it has been covered before. Through a close and careful analysis of an enormous quantity of primary and secondary material, she has attempted to present a more rounded, more inclusive account of the Chemical Revolution. She covers the period from the end of the seventeenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth, concentrating her efforts primarily on French chemists but also paying some attention to the contributions of such notables as G. E. Stahl, Richard Kirwan, and Torbern Bergman.

Modern French chemistry arose out of a thriving pharmaceutical tradition, which through long, painstaking experience devised the sophisticated analytical practices that provided what Kim terms the "material culture" of chemistry. But it was limited by the arcane terminology of an exclusive craft and contained little in the way of general scientific theory or law. A small group of "philosophical chemists," many associated with the Royal Academy [End Page 645] of Sciences, attempted to remedy this situation by placing chemical discourse within the fashionable theoretical context of Cartesian mechanism. Distinguished academicians such as William Homberg and Nicolas Lemery provided a corpuscular vision of chemical behavior that, though producing little in the way of permanent theory, gave chemists a heuristically constructive means of envisioning chemical activity at the molecular level. At the same time, attempts were made to frame general laws that would lend chemistry some of the predictive capabilities of the more established sciences.

As the title of her book indicates, Kim's major emphasis in tracing the genealogy of the Chemical Revolution is on efforts to discover fundamental laws of chemical affinity. This line of research was an "elusive dream" in the sense that no definitive account of chemical affinity was ever formulated during the period in question, but the attempt to do so was, in Kim's view, essential to the nature of the revolutionary process. In constructing their increasingly complex tables of affinity, eighteenth-century chemists made great strides toward fulfilling the compositional goals of their discipline and toward classifying the various types of chemical reactions. Kim also finds in efforts to quantify affinity a link between the Chemical Revolution of the eighteenth century and the chemical atomism of Dalton and Berzelius. Richard Kirwan, for example, attempted to measure the force of chemical affinity in terms of the amount of a standard acid required to saturate given quantities of various bases, a line of research that would eventually lay some of the stoichiometric foundations of Daltonian chemistry.

Kim will not, I am afraid, find much of an audience for her book beyond the small group of professionals who specialize in eighteenth-century chemistry. Her language is dense, she does not clearly define various terms, and she leaves her valuable analyses of specific chemical procedures in the original premodern chemical jargon. (Footnotes with the modern equivalents would have been helpful...

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