THE  AMERICAN 
JOURNAL  OF  PHARMACY 
AUGUST,  1904. 
SOME  EARLY  TEACHERS  OF  CHEMISTRY  IN  AMERICA. 
BY  M.  I.  WlIvBKRT, 
Apothecary  at  the  German  Hospital,  Philadelphia. 
The  science  of  chemistry,  as  we  know  it,  may  be  said  to  have  had 
its  inception  in  the  work  of  Johann  Joachim  Becher,  who  published 
several  books  relating  to  chemistry  some  time  after  the  middle  of 
the  seventeenth  century.  Becher's  ideas,  however,  were  so  radically 
different  from  those  held  by  the  then  dominating  sect  of  iatro- 
chemists  that  it  was  not  until  several  decades  later  that  they  were 
finally  adopted,  in  a  modified  form,  by  Georg  Ernst  Stahl  as  the 
basis  of  his  theory  of  phlogiston.  According  to  this  theory  it  was 
supposed  that  a  substance,  which  Stahl  called  phlogiston,  formed  a 
part  of  all  combustible  bodies  and  that  its  separation  constituted  fire. 
This  theory,  although  soon  found  to  be  untenable,  contributed 
very  largely  to  the  rapid  development  of  chemical  philosophy  that 
took  place  in  the  latter  decades  of  the  eighteenth  century,  when 
chemists  and  philosophers,  who  were  divided  into  two  sects  or 
schools,  followers  of  Stahl  or  Lavoisier,  vied  with  each  other  to  prove 
the  correctness  of  their  particular  beliefs  or  theories  by  actual  dem- 
onstrations and  experiments.  As  is  now  generally  recognized,  it  is 
to  this  experimental  work,  that  was  largely  done  to  defend  or  to 
prove  the  correctness  of  an  erroneous  theory,  that  we  are  indebted 
for  much  of  our  present  knowledge  of  chemical  properties  and 
phenomena. 
Recognizing  the,  at  that  time,  crude  and  undeveloped  condition 
of  chemical  philosophy,  it  will  not  surprise  us  to  find  that  the  first 
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