

I. A HISTORY OF METABOLISM 19 



f" 

 shirtly afterward fled to America. Scheele, though honored by scientific 



men the world over, remained a poor apothecary to the end of his days. 

 In the current parlance of to-day these two great contributors to human 

 knowledge would undoubtedly have been known outside their own circles 

 as "narrow-minded scientists." 



This, however, could never have been said of Lavoisier, who repeated 

 and extended their experiments, overthrew the phlogiston theory and 

 established modern chemistry. 



Lavoisier (1743-1794). The family of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 

 traced its ancestry back seven generations to Antoine Lavoisier, who was a 

 post-boy* in the stables of the king and who died in 1620. Successive 

 generations raised the position of the family name to ever higher levels 

 until it was said of the great Lavoisier that it would require perhaps a 

 hundred years for the appearance of his equal. Native intelligence, a 

 fine education, great wealth, combined with the environment of the 

 searchingly critical atmosphere of the Paris of his day, allowed of the 

 vivid inspiration which filled his life. 



Lavoisier was elected a member of the Academic des Sciences in 17G8 

 at the age of twenty-four. About the sam.e time, desirous of promoting 

 his personal fortune, he became associated with la ferme yenerale, through 

 whose activities the taxes were collected in France. Some of his fellow 

 academicians looked askance at this undertaking, but the mathematician 

 Fontaine is reported to have remarked, "Never mind, he will be able to 

 give us better dinners." (Grimaux, (fc) 1896.) 



In. the ferme generate the young man was the subordinate of one 

 Paulze, a nephew of the then all-powerful Terray, Minister of State and 

 Controller of Finance. At the age of twenty-eight Lavoisier married the 

 fourteen-year-old daughter of Paulze. His own position and his marriage 

 brought him great wealth but in no way diminished his tireless activity. 

 He congratulated himself that his patronage of the instrument makers 

 of Paris had rendered France independent of Great Britain in the manu- 

 facture of scientific instruments. 



Lavoisier's first paper before the Academic was "On the Nature of 

 Water and on Those Experiments Which Pretend to Prove Its Trans- 

 formation Into Earth." In this experiment he placed rain water in a 

 flask and boiled it for 101 days. Mineral matter appeared in the flask 

 but the whole did not change in weight and the mineral material which 

 appeared was shown to be derived from, the disintegration of the flask 

 itself, which lost in weight. Lavoisier used an extremely sensitive (ires 

 exact e) balance, made by the official who was charged with the weighing 

 of gold. 



Hero wo witness the overthrow of a dogma more than two thousand 

 years old, accomplished by the introduction of the quantitative method into 



