Elements of Chemistry,

oliver sacks' copy

Third English language edition of Traité Élémentaire de Chemie, the text that revolutionised chemistry. From the library of Dr. Oliver Sacks, with his octopus bookplate. Though best known as a neurologist, Sacks had a lifelong interest in chemistry. As recounted in the book Uncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood, he spent much of his childhood performing his own experiments and reading classic chemistry texts, and his thoughts on Lavoisier and Traité Élémentaire de Chemie comprise chapter ten.

Lavoisier's remarkable experimental program elucidated several major, interrelated aspects of chemistry. It 'finally established the modern conception of elements as substances which cannot be further decomposed' and the fact that matter is conserved in chemical processes, i.e., elements change their arrangements but are not themselves created or destroyed. This was connected with his discovery that respiration and combustion are similar processes, in which oxygen is taken from the air and added to another substance. He was therefore able to explain 'many cyclical processes in animal and vegetable life and to carry out the earliest biochemical experiments' (Printing and the Mind of Man 238).

As Sacks writes in Uncle Tungsten, 'All of Lavoisier's enterprises - the algebraic language, the nomenclature, the conservation of mass, the definition of an element, the formation of a true theory of combustion - were organically interlinked, formed a single marvellous structure, a revolutionary refounding of chemistry... The path to his revolution was not easy or direct, even though he presents it as obvious in the Elements of Chemistry... There had been violent disputes and conflicts during the years in which Lavoisier was slowly gathering his ammunition, but when the Elements was finally published - in 1789, just three months before the French Revolution - it took the scientific world by storm. It was an architecture of thought of an entirely new sort, comprable only to Newton's Principia'.

Third English language edition; 8vo; 2 folding tables, 13 engraved folding plates, bookplate of Oliver Sacks, contemporary ownership signature to title, a little toning and occasional small spots to the text, plates possibly added from another volume, with some dampstain and tanning; original blue boards, rebacked to style with printed paper label to spine, boards worn, very good condition; 592pp.

Printing and the Mind of Man 238; Hook & Norman, The Norman Library of Science and Medicine 1295 (all for the first edition).