Repository: UIHistories Project: Booklet - Addresses from Inauguration of Noyes [PAGE 47]

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chemists, For these men were actuated by nn entirely new and different spirit th< desire to know and the desire to gain knowledge that it might become freely the property of the whole world~and the knowledge they soughl was not like that of Hie alchemist, whose aim was selfish and personal and whose greatest fear was thai hi secret discovery might become common property and so lose its value. During the two centuries that follow 1 there was a slow accumulation of chemical knowledge which passed freely among th few who had become imbued with this new spirit of investigation. During thi period there was developed, too, the first r Lly important generalization of the science— the theory of phlogiston which gave a qualitative explanation of the phenomena £ combustion. This theory lived for more than a century and was useful in its time, but when the fundamental facts about combustion were discovered by Priestley and Cavendish and Lavoisier the theory was no longer n ded. It was Dot displaced by a new theory, for the knowledge of the impl< facts about oxygen and its relation to c i< bustion was enough. At the dawn of the nineteenth eoiitur\ Dalton gave to the world the n ri gr I generalization of our science the atomic theory. This thenn has been the central idea which has permeated the science o fuided its development since that tim it has given to as a vivid pioture which inter prets and <da dies foe us the hew ilderinn m m of experimental tacts acquired bj the work of thousands of chemisi But while we find thai this central r u |.