"The History of Chemistry" spans a period from very old times to the modern era. Since several millennia BC, civilizations were using technologies that would eventually form the basis of the various branches of chemistry. Chemistry was preceded by its protoscience, alchemy, which is an intuitive but non-scientific approach to understanding the constituents of matter and their interactions. It was unsuccessful in explaining the nature of matter and its transformations, but, by performing experiments and recording the results, alchemists set the stage for modern chemistry. While both alchemy and chemistry are concerned with matter and its transformations, the crucial difference was given by the scientific method that chemists employed in their work. Chemistry is considered to have become an established science with the work of Antoine Lavoisier, who developed a law of conservation of mass that demanded careful measurement and quantitative observations of chemical phenomena. The object of this work is to present a comprehensive overview of the progress of chemistry, from its first rude and modest beginnings till it has reached its modern state of importance as one of the leading sciences.
Volume 1:
Of Alchymy
Of the Chemical Knowledge Possessed by the Ancients
Chemistry of the Arabians
Of the Progress of Chemistry under Paracelsus and His Disciples
Of Van Helmont and the Iatro-Chemists
Of Agricola and Metallurgy
Of Glauber, Lemery, and Some Other Chemists of the End of the Seventeenth Century
Of the Attempts to Establish a Theory in Chemistry
Of the Foundation and Progress of Scientific Chemistry in Great Britain
Volume 2:
Of the Foundation and Progress of Scientific Chemistry in Great Britain
Of the Progress of Philosophical Chemistry in Sweden
Progress of Scientific Chemistry in France
Progress of Analytical Chemistry
Of Electro-Chemistry
Of the Atomic Theory
Of the Present State of Chemistry