Josiah Parsons Cooke, the Natural Philosophy of Sir John F. W. Herschel and the Rational Chemistry of the Elements

Abstract

The natural philosophy of chemistry grew slowly until the articulation of the axiom of chemical atoms by John Dalton in the early nineteenth century. Sir John F. W. Herschel was one of the leading natural philosophers of the nineteenth century and published his own monograph, in which he listed the ten key axioms of chemistry. Later in that decade, he gave the President’s address for the Chemistry Section at the 1858 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. He identified significant progress in understanding the relationships between the known chemical elements by Josiah Parsons Cooke of Harvard. Examination of the long paper by Cooke published in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855 gives his natural groupings of the known chemical elements. Further progress contained in Cooke’s 1868 textbook, First Principles of Chemical Philosophy, documents just how important his work was in the development of the periodic table, soon to be published by Mendeleev. I. Bernhard Cohen lauded Cooke as the first really significant academic chemist in America.