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Title page of The Sceptical Chymist

The Sceptical Chymist or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes is the title of Robert Boyle's masterpiece of scientific literature, published in London in 1661. In the form of a dialogue, the Sceptical Chymist presented Boyle's hypothesis that matter consisted of atoms and clusters of atoms in motion and that every phenomenon was the result of collisions of particles in motion. He appealed to chemists to experiment and asserted that experiments denied the limiting of chemical elements to only the classic four: earth, fire, air, and water. He also pleaded that chemistry should cease to be subservient to medicine or to alchemy, and rise to the status of a science. Importantly, he advocated a rigorous approach to scientific experiment: he believed all theories must be proved experimentally before being regarded as true. For these reasons Robert Boyle has been called the founder of modern chemistry. Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (489x800, 90 KB) Summary The Skeptical Chymist title page Licensing This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired in the United States and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (489x800, 90 KB) Summary The Skeptical Chymist title page Licensing This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired in the United States and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years... Robert Boyle Robert Boyle (25 January 1627 – 30 December 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, inventor, and early gentleman scientist, noted for his work in physics and chemistry. ... This article is about the capital of England and the United Kingdom. ... 1661 (MDCLXI) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Tuesday of the 10-day slower Julian calendar). ... Properties For alternative meanings see atom (disambiguation). ... The periodic table of the chemical elements A chemical element, or element for short, is a type of atom that is defined by its atomic number; that is, by the number of protons in its nucleus. ... Chinese Wood (木) | Fire (火) Earth (土) | Metal (金) | Water (水) Hinduism and Buddhism Vayu / Pavan — Air / Wind Agni / Tejas — Fire Akasha — Aether Prithvi / Bhumi — Earth Ap / Jala — Water Many ancient philosophies used a set of archetypal classical elements to explain patterns in nature. ... For other uses, see Alchemy (disambiguation). ... This article or section includes a list of works cited but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. ...

The Sceptical Chymist is well written, enlivened with touches of humour, as when the alchemists are compared with "the Navigators of Solomon's Tarshish Fleet, who brought home … not only Gold, and Silver, and Ivory, but Apes and Peacocks too", since their theories "either like Peacock's feathers make a great shew, but are neither solid nor useful; or else, like Apes, if they have some appearance of being rational, are blemish'd with some absurdity or other which makes them appear ridiculous." The chief value of The Sceptical Chymist, aside from its main message, was the wealth of chemical experiment that showed the chemist how to employ standard terms and nomenclature in chemical explanation and also presented new chemical fact. Scientific classification or biological classification is a method by which biologists group and categorize species of organisms. ...

External links

• Electronic copy of the book at schoenberg center for electronic text & image