LAVOISIER, Marie-Anne Paulze (trans.); KIRWAN, Richard.

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De la force des acides, & de la proportion des substances qui composent les sels neutres First edition, scarce offprint issue, of Madame Lavoisier's critical translation of the work of a prominent fellow of the Royal Society. In the UK, institutional copies are recorded at UCL and in the Wellcome Collection.Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (1758-1836) famously refuted the claims of the chemist Richard Kirwan (1733-1812) several times. In 1787, after he published his Essay on Phlogiston, she brought out a similarly deprecatory translation, complete with a preface which undermined his authority as an academic. Kirwan published Of the strength of acids, and the proportion of ingredients in neutral salts in Dublin in 1791. In her translation, Lavoisier's extensive annotations and critical apparatus focus on Kirwan's scientific and procedural errors. "II y a dans ces sortes d'expériences une cause d'erreurs qui paroit avoir échappé à M. Kirwan; c'est la grande quantité d'eau que l'acide carbonique est susceptible de dissoudre et qui échappe avec lui" ("There is in these types of experiences a cause of errors which appears to have escaped Mr Kirwan: the large quantity of water which carbonic acid is likely to dissolve, and which escapes with it" - p. 40).Marie-Anne married Antoine Lavoisier in 1771. She promoted their collaborative work to the international scientific community and used her command of languages to keep Antoine abreast of the latest developments. "Through her drawings, t

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