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" "This opinion is defective, to say no worse of it, in many respects. First, in attributing life to lead. Secondly, in supposing that the presence of the celestial heat makes it light, and its absence heavy. Thirdly, because it assigns the same reason for the increased weight of lead by calcination, and of animals by death. There is nothing of the kind. For as to life, how can lead possess it, since it is a homogeneous body, without difference of parts, without organs, and without any vital effect or action? If it move downwards, so does ceruse, which is only its corpse; if it be cooling (rafraischit), so is ceruse. Then how could it preserve this life, under a million of forms, that it may be made to assume and to cast off, yet always continuing to be lead? How, in the furnace (which would be a much greater wonder), where it may be kept in fusion a day, a month, or a whole year? It must have a very tenacious soul to undergo so much without being dislodged!
John Rey (1583–1645) (or, in French) Jean Rey, was a physician of , France who in 1630 published a tract on , or of metals, after being notified by Brun, an apothecary of Bergerac, France, of Brun's experiments (as early as 1629) on the calcination of tin. Brun had melted 2 pounds six ounces of tin, and after 6 hours the resulting calx weighed seven ounces more than the original tin. More than one hundred and forty years before Antoine Lavoisier, John Rey recognized that in the calcination of lead or tin, part of the air provided an increase in mass to the calcined metal oxide. His work was eclipsed first by the phlogiston theory and then later, by Lavoisier's discoveries disproving the existence of phlogiston. Lavoisier's oxygen theory confirmed Rey's earlier report, of which Lavoisier claimed he was unaware. After the presentation of Lavoisier's 1775 memoir at the Académie des sciences, (1725-1798) wrote a letter to Abbé , director of the journal Observations sur la Physique, sur l'Histoire naturelle and sur les Arts, to ask him to publish an update notice, recognizing the priority Rey's work.
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Plants too ought to become heavy by death, the celestial heat being expelled: but the contrary is evident to all. As to the increased weight of animals by death, the true cause, far remote from that which increases the weight of lead when calcined, is this: in the living animal its natural heat subtilizes, dilates, and augments the dimensions of the humours, the flesh, and every thing in it capable of dilatation—but losing this heat by death, the whole on this becoming cold, contracts and diminishes, whence the increase of weight, as I have often said already. What is there like this in lead?
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