Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution

Laws of Another Order

Victor D. Boantza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317099338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The seventeenth-century scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century chemical revolution are rarely considered together, either in general histories of science or in more specific surveys of early modern science or chemistry. This tendency arises from the long-held view that the rise of modern physics and the emergence of modern chemistry comprise two distinct and unconnected episodes in the history of science. Although chemistry was deeply transformed during and between both revolutions, the scientific revolution is traditionally associated with the physical and mathematical sciences whereas modern chemistry is seen as the exclusive product of the chemical revolution. This historiographical tension, between similarity in 'form' and disparity in historical 'content' of the two events, has tainted the way we understand the rise of modern chemistry as an integral part of the advent of modern science. Against this background, Matter and Method in the Long Chemical Revolution examines the role of and effects on chemistry of both revolutions in parallel, using chemistry during the chemical revolution to illuminate chemistry during the scientific revolution, and vice versa. Focusing on the crises and conflicts of early modern chemistry (and their retrospectively labeled 'losing' parties), the author traces patterns of continuity in matter theory and experimental method from Boyle to Lavoisier, and reevaluates the disciplinary relationships between chemists, mechanists, and Newtonians in France, England, and Scotland. Adopting a unique approach to the study of the scientific and chemical revolutions, and to early modern chemical thought and practice in particular, the author challenges the standard revolution-centered history of early modern science, and reinterprets the rise of chemistry as an independent discipline in the long eighteenth century.

PART I
Chymistry in the Scientific Revolution

Duclos and Chymistry at the Early Académie des Sciences

In October 1685, the Amsterdam journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres announced:

The [French Royal] Academy of Sciences has recently lost one of its members by the death of M. du Clos. He was a physician aged 87 who lived in the house containing the Bibliothèque du roi. He disliked attending the sick, and he preferred to give his time to study, to chemical experiments, and to research on the Philosopher’s Stone.

This brief note was followed by a “copy of a manuscript by M. Clément containing the declaration that M. du Clos made shortly before his death concerning the Philosopher’s Stone.” This is what Nicolas Clément,1 Duclos’s longtime neighbor at the King’s Library (Bibliothèque du Roi), wrote:

The 20 August 1685, Monsieur du Clos, physician, being on his sick bed but sound in mind and judgment, I approached him to ask if he had anything to say concerning his writings; he told me that if I was spoken to about them, he begged me to bear witness that he had no complete work except a treatise on salts and mixtures that he had put in the hands of M. de la Chapelle; that he had meant for a long time to publish this treatise; that M. Colbert and a substantial proportion of the Academy had approved it, but that M. du Hamel, being always opposed to it on account of certain opinions that he could not accept, he had not been able to obtain permission to get it printed, a fact that obliged him to give one part to Elsevier who was at the time in Paris, & who printed it in Amsterdam. Regarding the other writings, he stated that he had burnt them five or six months before. I let him know the wrong he had done in depriving his friends of the knowledge to be drawn from so many fine observations; but he told me that they were only formless fragments and nothing more; that, seeing that he was in no state to analyze them nor to put them in order & no one after him being capable of doing it in the same spirit, he preferred to put them in the fire. That, moreover, M. Friquet, his nephew who is a painter and professor of anatomy in the Royal Academy of Painting, tolerably successful in his field, he feared that if after his death he found these writings, most of which were observations and experiments on the transmutation of metals, that it would give him the opportunity to take up research that would divert him from his profession and cause him to waste his time and resources so uselessly … he was ready to swear that all the research he had done had served only to confirm him in his present way of thinking, that there was nothing more futile nor more useless than holding out the hope of being able to arrive at the transformation of metals … The esteem and reputation he acquired amongst the worthy men who knew him will perhaps ensure that they will not be distressed to see what he thought about a question to which he had applied so many experiments and so much fine knowledge without other success than that of having recognized its futility, at a time when nothing obliged him to conceal his true beliefs.2

This is an intriguing document; its subject, “Monsieur du Clos,” even more so.

Samuel Cottereau Duclos (1598–1685) was among the founding members of the French Royal Academy of Science (Figure I.1 below). He was part of a group of eminent natural philosophers handpicked by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), Louis XIV’s minister of finance and the Academy’s protector from its establishment in 1666 until his death in 1683.3 At the time of his election, Duclos was 68 years old. This election indicates that he was held in high professional esteem as a theoretical and practicing chymist. Despite his influence, and despite increasing scholarly attention, we know little about his life and work. In effect, his appointment as senior academician marks Duclos’s appearance on the historical record, almost ex nihilo.4 Depicting the mystery surrounding Duclos’s life and career, David Sturdy has observed how “exceedingly difficult” it is to “adduce documentary evidence relating to [his] biography.” Yet “this savant,” he noted, “so elusive to the present-day scholar in one respect, nevertheless was among the most active members of the Académie des Sciences during its early and formative period.” The chronicles of the early academy—especially the procès-verbaux (minutes of the weekly meetings) for the period 1666–695—bear witness to an exceptionally high level of activity and influence on Duclos’s part, who is mentioned more than any other academician.6 Contrary to his deathbed claim that he had “burnt [his writings] five or six months before,” several of his works survive in manuscript form and, when considered alongside the numerous memoirs and contributions found in the Academy’s minutes, they comprise a substantial body of work. Alice Stroup has provided us with the best portrait of science and politics at the early Academy, as well as the best study to date of Duclos’s work and role in the Academy.7 But even she has pointed out that he “is largely absent from the history of the Academy and of the scientific revolution.”8

Figure I.1 Samuel C. Duclos (1598–1685). Courtesy of Images from the History of Medicine (IHM), National Library of Medicine.

Note: The caption reads: “Agathange Coitereau S^r Duclos Con^sr et Medecin Ord^redu Roy Directeur de Laboratoire de La Cademie Royalle des Scienc[e].” The small print above Duclos’s name identifies Louis Cossin (1627–1704) as the engraver, who worked after a painting by the Montpellier-born Protestant artist Sébastien Bourdon (1616–71). Despite being one of the founder members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, due to religious intolerance Bourdon fled France and found his way to the Swedish court. Bourdon’s original portrait probably dates to sometime between Duclos’s appointment to the Academy in 1666 and Bourdon’s death.

Reconstructing Duclos’s pre-academic career presents considerable challenges, not least because four Protestant physicians named Samuel du Clos are known to have flourished around the same time.9 Duclos was born in Paris in 1598 and died there between August and October 1685. He might have completed his medical studies at Paris;10 during the 1640s–50s he had a laboratory in Paris, where he practiced chymistry and pharmacy. Nicaise Lefebvre, author of a popular chymical textbook (and later chymist and apothecary to King Charles II), had been under Duclos’s tutelage.11 There is evidence to suggest Duclos was involved in the preparation of the Latin edition of Paracelsus’s work, the Opera Omnia medico-chemico-chirurgica, tribus voluminibus comprehensa, which was edited by Fridericus Bitiskius and published in Geneva in 1658.12 Duclos thus exemplifies the close relationship between seventeenth-century French Protestantism (Huguenot), Paracelsianism, and chymico-medical pursuits. On his deathbed Duclos abjured not only his alchemical beliefs but also his religion, converting to Catholicism.13

Among the founding members of the Academy were seven “mathematicians” responsible for the study of geometry and astronomy, and seven “philosophers” in charge of physics, chymistry, anatomy, medicine, and botany. During the early period, the late 1660s and early 1670s, Duclos dominated the research agenda of the philosophical group, presenting memoirs on topics that were key in both institutional and philosophical contexts: such as research into the principles of mixts, matter theory, botany, chymical analysis, and the study of mineral waters, to name a few. Sturdy’s institutional study of the Academy and its academicians suggests a preference for savants in their forties and in their sixties. The former were regarded as the Academy’s future intellectual spearhead, while the latter were recruited for their scientific distinction, experience, and prestige.14 In chymistry, this prototype was followed closely. The younger Claude Bourdelin,15 practicing apothecary and skilled experimenter, was hired to help Duclos equip, build up, and manage the Academy’s laboratories, and to help him develop the program for chymical analysis.16 Bourdelin never ascended beyond the status of a reliable distiller. While the senior Duclos determined the chymical research agenda and conducted lecture-demonstrations for the scientific assembly, Bourdelin carried out vast numbers of distillations. Duclos raised thorny subjects like matter theory and vitalism to be discussed by academicians, and he shared with them his concern about the validity of contemporary elemental theories and the introduction of mechanism into chymistry. Drawing on Paracelsian and Helmontian views, Duclos professed his belief in solution analysis as the ultimate analytical tool in chymistry. The application of a universal solvent (alkahest) held the promise of reaching beyond the received products of distillation—the Paracelsian tria prima or the Aristotelian four elements—toward an ultimate resolution of mixts into their elementary constituents.

Unlike other academicians, following his appointment, Duclos conducted his entire research within the Academy, partly due to his special relationship to its laboratory, which he designed and administered and in which he also resided for some time.17 His only published works are Observations on the Mineral Waters of France and a Dissertation on the Principles of Natural Mixts, both of which were the outcome of work carried out at the Academy.18 The systematic study of French mineral waters and spas had been commissioned by the Crown and published in Paris in 1675 with the Academy’s imprimatur. The dissertation on natural mixts, however, which advanced a vitalistic cosmology inspired by Neoplatonic and Helmontian philosophies, was denied publication by the conservative Academy of the 1670s: a committee of four had voted against it, accusing Duclos of Platonism.19 The Dissertation was subsequently published by Elsevier (also Van Helmont’s publisher) in 1680 in Amsterdam, where censorship was minimal.

Duclos referred to the Dissertation on his deathbed as the “treatise on salts and mixtures,” while pointing an accusatory finger at Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel (1623–1706), the first secretary of the Academy, as the censor, “being always opposed to it on account of certain opinions that he could not accept.”20 Duclos’s “treatise on salts and mixtures,” as he framed it, suggests he had planned a larger work, of which the Dissertation was one part; the second part would have been a treatise on salts. Due to the decline in his academic status during the 1670s and 1680s, aspects of which are discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, Duclos had “to give one part to Elsevier who was at the time in Paris, & who printed it in Amsterdam.” The second part, the “treatise on salts,” is found in an unpublished manuscript: Dissertations sur les sel, contenüe en plusieurs letters escrites à un physicien de l’Académie royale des Sciences par un autre physicien de la mesme Académie, en l’an 1677.21

In the manuscript Duclos is referred to as a “physicien” of the Academy. The full title of the published part is Dissertation sur les principes des mixtes naturels, fait en l’an 1677, par le Sr Du Clos, Conseiller et Médecin ordinaire du Roy, & l’un des Physiciens de l’Académie Royale des Sciences. This agrees with Clément’s depiction of Duclos as a “physician”; but it also suggests his function as a royal physician. From 1666 to 1680, when the dissertation on mixts was published, Duclos held his appointment as Royal Academician, which raises the possibility that he might have been a court physician sometime before 1666, possibly to Louis XIV.22 In any case, it seems that at least during his career as academician (the last 19 years of his life), Duclos dedicated his time to chymistry rather than medicine. As Clément noted, he “disliked attending the sick, and he preferred to give his time to study, to chemical experiments, and to research on the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Just as notable is Clément’s portrayal of Duclos as someone who “had dedicated the best part of his life to research on natural causes, particularly those concerning the transmutation of metals and on what is called the Great Work.”23 This lifelong devotion to alchemy and chymistry seems likely, especially considering Duclos’s dissertations and memoirs, all of which demonstrate his experimental skills, theoretical knowledge, and acquaintance with chymical and alchemic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Chymistry In The Scientific Revolution
• Part II: Chemistry In The Chemical Revolution
• Bibliography
• Index