Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OEIGIN OF CHEMISTRY. LETTER III. It is not easy to form an idea of the extent of chemical knowledge at the present day without casting a glance back to past ages. The history of science fills a page in the history of the human mind; and there is no department of science, the history of which is more interesting and instructive, in reference both to its origin and to its development, than chemistry. The received belief of the recent origin of that science is an error, originating in accidental circumstances. Chemistry is one of the very oldest of the sciences. The same spirit which, towards the close of the last century, aroused in a highly civilised nation the insane endeavour to annihilate the monuments of its history and of its glory, ?which raised altars to the Goddess of Reason, and introduced a new calendar; ? that spirit gave rise also to a festival in which Madame Lavoisier, robed as a priestess, committed to the flames on an altar, while a solemn requiem was chanted, the phlogistic system of chemistry. At that period, the chemists of France associated themselves for the purpose of changing all the names and symbols which had been employed up to that time to designate chemical compounds, and to represent chemical processes. A new nomenclature was introduced, which, in the train of a new system, complete in itself, soon secured for itself a universal reception. This, then, was the origin of the apparently wide gulf separating modern from ancient chemistry. The history of every important discovery, of every separate observation, made up to the time of Lavoisier, in anypart of Europe, was then blotted out; while new names and altered views tore asunder all connection with the past. To many, the knowledge we now possess appears to be only the inheritance of the French…