Elements of Chemistry,

£1,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

oliver sacks' copy Third English language edition of Traité Élémentaire de Chemie, the text that revolutionised chemistry. From the library of Dr. Oliver Sacks, with his octopus bookplate. Though best known as a neurologist, Sacks had a lifelong interest in chemistry. As recounted in the book Uncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood, he spent much of his childhood performing his own experiments and reading classic chemistry texts, and his thoughts on Lavoisier and Traité Élémentaire de Chemie comprise chapter ten. Lavoisier's remarkable experimental program elucidated several major, interrelated aspects of chemistry. It 'finally established the modern conception of elements as substances which cannot be further decomposed' and the fact that matter is conserved in chemical processes, i.e., elements change their arrangements but are not themselves created or destroyed. This was connected with his discovery that respiration and combustion are similar processes, in which oxygen is taken from the air and added to another substance. He was therefore able to explain 'many cyclical processes in animal and vegetable life and to carry out the earliest biochemical experiments' (Printing and the Mind of Man 238). As Sacks writes in Uncle Tungsten, 'All of Lavoisier's enterprises - the algebraic language, the nomenclature, the conservation of mass, the definition of an element, the formation of a true theory of combustion - were organically interlinked, formed a single marvellous str

• Binding: Hardcover

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