The list of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's opponents is a long and distinguished one, ranging from Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish to Jean-Paul Marat. Among the less distinguished members of this company is Antoine Monnet, a minor chemist and mineralogist whose fame rests in large part on the very fact that he and Lavoisier became enemies. Unlike his better-known contemporaries, Monnet remains almost wholly neglected, and no attempt has yet been made to sort out the issues in his controversy with Lavoisier; instead, (...) Lavoisier's biographers have been content to accept Lavoisier's own version of at least a part of the affair, with the result that Monnet has emerged as the villain of the piece and Lavoisier as the injured victim. The two men probably first came into close contact in 1776 or 1777, the nature of their relationship has remained obscure for the period 1777–1780, and the situation after 1780 has been summarized by biographers in a manner resembling that of Edouard Grimaux:“ayant en main tous les documents réunis par Guettard et Lavoisier, il [Monnet] ajouta de nouvelles cartes à celles qui étaient déjà gravées, et publia, en 1780, un altas minéralogique incomplet, qu'il signa avec Guettard, tout en s'attribuant la plus grande part du travail. Il cita, il est vrai, Lavoisier comme l'auteur des seize premières cartes, mais il utilisa sans son aveu et sans le nommer les matériaux préparés pour le reste du travail, et négligea d'indiquer que les coupes placées en marge de chaque carte étaient le résultat des nivellements faits au baromètre par Lavoisier. Celui-ci en fut vivement froissé … Il trouva toujours en Monnet un adversaire obstiné qui, en 1798, attaquait encore les doctrines nouvelles en publiant une soi-disant Démonstration de la fausseté des principes des nouveaux chimistes.”. (shrink)

Shortly before his death in 1934, the British historian of chemistry, A. N. Meldrum, published two lengthy articles on Lavoisier's early career in science. After a careful investigation of the collection of manuscripts at the Académie des Sciences in Paris and in light of a detailed and penetrating analysis of Lavoisier's published work, Meldrum concluded that as a youth, Lavoisier was concerned with chemistry only to the extent that he found it useful for his mineralogical and geological researches. Lavoisier began (...) his career as a mineralogist; he became a chemist only in 1772, the “crucial year” when he turned his attention to chemical theory for its own sake and started his famous course of experiments on the nature of combustion and fixed air. Although some details—notably concerning Lavoisier's early education and geological work—have been added to this account since Meldrum's time, the broad conclusions of Meldrum's study are still generally accepted by historians of the chemical revolution. (shrink)

During the second half of the twentieth century, the domain of geochemistry has greatly expanded and the field is today often seen as a branch of an extended chemistry of the Earth, called cosmochemistry. This paper is a historical introduction to cosmochemistry in which the wider cosmic aspects are surveyed up to about 1915, when nuclear physics changed the scene. These wider aspects or themes include, firstly, the attempts to determine the relative abundances of the elements, secondly, the extension of (...) geochemistry to include physical geochemistry, thirdly, the study of meteorites and, fourthly, the spectroscopic study of the stars within the astrochemical tradition. Because of the lack of reliable data, a great deal of the protocosmochemistry described in the present paper was speculative. Nonetheless, by 1915 the contours of the cosmochemistry of the future were just visible and the developments here singled out can thus be seen as belonging to the prehistory of modern cosmochemistry. (shrink)