126 
After three years of planning, a chem- 
ical laboratory was built, and on the 12th 
of October, 1748, it was opened. The 
building, a modest one, measured 45 X 36 
feet, and was divided into a large room for 
work and two small rooms for lectures and 
storage. It cost $4,000, and about $1,800 
additional was spent on furnaces and other 
equipment. Thus, in providing a place for 
laboratory instruction, as well as for re- 
search in chemistry, Lomonossoff was fifty 
years ahead of Hope in Glasgow and sev- 
enty-five years ahead of Liebig. 
Lomonossoft’s period of greatest chem- 
ical activity was compressed into the nine 
years that followed the opening of the 
laboratory, for in 1757 he resigned his 
chair. During the remaining eight years 
of his life the numerous activities of a 
public man, and a diversion of his interests 
into other scientific lines, interfered with 
chemical work. 
Up to the end of the eighteenth century, 
there was utter confusion of thought in 
regard to the composition of materials. In 
considering the make-up of a specimen, 
and the changes occurring during an ex- 
periment, heat-matter, light-matter and 
weight-matter, as well as phlogiston, weré 
taken into account. As we have seen, even 
Scheele interpreted the phenomena he ob- 
served upon the theory that heat was an 
oxide of phlogiston! The composition was 
often stated in terms of salt, sulphur and 
mercury, whether there was evidence of 
their presence or not. The ‘‘elements’’ of 
Aristotle, and cognate ideas, were used in 
describing and in thinking about chemical 
phenomena. In consequence, Priestley 
thought he had a method of measuring the 
““ooodness’’ of air—as a quality—when in 
point of fact he was measuring the amount 
of oxygen—as a component. With the 
basal conceptions thus in a state of utter 
chaos, it is no wonder that the simplest 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Von. KKXV. No. 891 
chemical situations were wholly misunder- 
stood, and that the simplest experimental 
results, being described in terms of non- 
existent entities, and thought of in terms 
of non-existent relations, failed of their 
object. It was Lavoisier who received the 
credit for setting our ideas permanently in 
order, by his emphasis upon the signifi- 
cance of the evidence of the balance, and 
by his setting forth clearly the idea of 
chemical compounds and their component 
elementary substances, and by giving a 
classified list of the latter. 
The chemical reformation might have 
come half a century sooner, however, if 
Lomonossoft’s papers had been more widely 
known. As we have seen, to him heat and 
light were not forms of matter and phlo- 
giston had no existence. His forms of 
matter were the same as ours, and his ideas 
of chemical composition, what it included 
and what it excluded, the same as ours. 
In his ‘‘Elements of Mathematical Chem- 
istry’? (1741), and in a later paper 
““On the Imperceptible Physical Particles, 
which Compose Natural Materials, and in 
which is to be found a Sufficient Basis for 
the Specific Properties’? (1742-43), he 
gives a singularly clear and minute discus- 
sion of the whole subject. He distin- 
cuishes between the attributes (weight, vol- 
ume, ete.) of a body or specimen, and the 
specific properties which characterize a 
substance. In modern fashion, he defines 
the ‘‘imperceptible particles’’ or “‘corpus- 
eles’? (molecules), which are portions of a 
substance, and the ‘‘physical monads’’ or 
‘elements’? (atoms) which are not decom- 
posed in chemical change. He draws 
clearly and in detail the distinction be- 
tween simple and compound substances, 
the latter of which contains the ‘‘prin- 
8This and parts of others of his papers are 
published, in German translation, in Ostwald’s 
Klassiker, 178. 
