Project Gutenberg's Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2, by Carl Wilhelm Scheele

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Title: Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2

Author: Carl Wilhelm Scheele

Release Date: August 9, 2008 [EBook #26243]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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DISCOVERY OF OXYGEN

PART 2

EXPERIMENTS BY

CARL WILHELM SCHEELE

(1777)

Re issue Edition:

Published for THE ALEMBIC CLUB

BY

E. & S. LIVINGSTONE LTD.

16 & 17 TEVIOT PLACE

EDINBURGH

1964

[Illustration]

PREFACE

The portions of Scheele's "Chemical Treatise on Air and Fire" here
reproduced in English are intended to form a companion volume to No. 7
of the Club Reprints, which contains Priestley's account of his
discovery of oxygen. Not only have the claims of Scheele to the
independent discovery of this gas never been disputed, but the valuable
volume of "Letters and Memoranda" of Scheele, edited by Nordenskjoeld,
which was published in 1892, places it beyond doubt that Scheele had
obtained oxygen by more than one method at least as early as Priestley's
first isolation of the gas, although his printed account of the
discovery only appeared about two years after Priestley's. The evidence
of this has been found in Scheele's laboratory notes, which are still
preserved in the Royal Academy of Science in Stockholm.

In his "Chemical Treatise" Scheele endeavours, at considerable length,
to prove by experiments his views as to the compound character of heat
and of light. These portions of the work have been entirely omitted from
what is reproduced here. All the places where omissions have been made
are indicated.

Every care has been taken in the endeavour to make the translation a
faithful reproduction of the meaning of the original, whilst literal
accuracy has been aimed at rather than literary elegance.

L. D.

CHEMICAL TREATISE ON AIR AND FIRE.[A]

+1.+ It is the object and chief business of chemistry to skilfully
separate substances into their constituents, to discover their
properties, and to comp