Lavoisier as a reader of chemical literature
Marco Beretta (*)
way of
It has often been claimed that Lavoisier was distinctly ungenerous when it came to acknowledging the sources which influenced the development of his chemical system. When this allegation has been made, the controversy on the priority of the discovery of oxygen has usually been cited. Many historians, especially British and Swedish ones, have declared Lavoisier's claim to have been the first to isolate oxygen illegitimate and given the experimental credit for the discovery to Scheele and Priestley (1). What has made these historians particularly severe on the French chemist is the
(*) Marco Beretta, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Piazza dei Giudici 1, 50122 Firenze, Italie. (1) On this see Aldo Mieli, Le questioni di priorita e dei precursori, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences (1947-1948), 9-17; Maurice Daumas, Lavoisier théoricien et expérimentateur (Paris, pup, 1955), 67-90; J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, vol. 3 (London : MacMillan, 1962), 374-376; Uno Boklund, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, His Work and Life. The Brown Book (Stockholm : Roos, 1968), 365-392. Rev. Hist. Sci., 1995, XLVIII/1-2, 71-94