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Mixture and Chemical Combination pp 34–42Cite as

The Law of Definite Proportions

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Part of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science book series (BSPS,volume 223)

Abstract

Those [53] who have read the authors of the seventeenth century and, particularly, the eighteenth century, will be quite surprised to hear that Proust is credited with establishing the law of definite proportions. All these authors seem to admit, and several formally state, the following truth: when two substances combine together, the mass of the one stands in a fixed relation to the mass of the other.

Keywords

  • Foreign Body
  • Eighteenth Century
  • Physical Mixture
  • Chemical Combination
  • Fixed Relation

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Refferences

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  10. Despite the quotation marks, what Duhem writes between them is not exactly the same as what he writes as the first quotation in the second paragraph of this chapter.]

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  13. [Opticks, p. 381. The words “and saturate,” corresponding to Duhem’s “et saturer,” are not in the English version.]

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Authors
  1. Pierre Duhem
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Duhem, P. (2002). The Law of Definite Proportions. In: Mixture and Chemical Combination. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 223. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2292-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2292-6_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5924-6

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