Looking for an Order of Things: Textbooks and Chemical Classifications in Nineteenth Century France

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the issue of the creativity of textbook writing by exploring the links between nineteenth-century French textbooks and the quest for a classification of elements. The first section presents the elegant combination of didactic and chemical constraints invented by eighteenth-century chemists: the order of learning - from the known to the unknown - and the order of things - from the simple to the complex - were one and the same. In section two we argue that the alleged coincidence did not help the authors of elementary textbooks required for the new schools set up by the French revolution. Hence the variety of classifications adopted in the early nineteenth century. A debate between natural and artificial classifications raised a tension in the 1830s without really dividing the chemical community. Rather it ended up with the adoption of a hybrid classification, combining the rival natural and artificial systems.

Analogy and Composition in Early Nineteenth-Century Chemistry The Case of Aluminium

“…According to Bartha (ibid.,, it is justified to make such an inference if the creation of a common kind is based on shared features that are informative. In the chemical community of the early nineteenth century, there was an ongoing debate regarding the similarities that were significant enough to dictate the organization of chemical classifications (see Bertomeu-Sánchez et al 2002). More work is needed on chemical kind formation and the question of whether chemists' criteria were informative.…”

“…Now, it is proven that the latter are truly oxides: so we must also, by analogy, accept the former to be oxides; (…)." (Thenard 1813, 2: 36-37) Thenard's textbook was used by the French Ministry of Public Instruction as the model for chemistry teaching, and his classification was copied by most French textbooks of the early nineteenth century (see Bertomeu-Sánchez et al 2002). Berzelius' textbook Lärbok i Kemien ran for many editions and its translations in five languages enjoyed a tremendous success (Jorpes 1970, 94-96).…”

Form and formalism in linguistics

“…The canonical topoi just considered enjoyed a hearty afterlife in the Disziplingeschichte of the late nineteenth century, and its review in textbooks thereafter. This section looks at the deployment of visual aids in that genre, building on previous studies of print and pedagogy in the history of chemistry, physics, and biology (Bertomeu-Sánchez et al 2002;Hopwood 2015). This literature has shown how scientific textbooks specialized from the late eighteenth century on, emphasizing their "use in formal teaching and their pedagogical and scientific authority"; their significance for disciplinary self-fashioning; and their "major role" in the making of interactional expertise, that is "the worldviews of citizens, what they know, what they do, what they are" (Simon 2016: 475, 479;Johns 1998: 406-408).…”

Le rôle des manuels dans la disciplinarisation de la toxicologie en France au xixe siècle

“…Différentes études sur les manuels de chimie de langue française ont montré leur renouvellement dans le premier tiers du xix e siècle et leur rôle de livres-modèles comme celui de Louis-Jacques Thenard [Bertomeu-Sánchez & García-Belmar 2000], leur rôle dans la diffusion de l'atomisme [Kounelis 2000], [Bertomeu-Sánchez & García-Belmar 2004], dans la marginalisation de certaines idées [Grapí 2001], dans l'élaboration de systèmes de classifications des éléments [Bertomeu-Sánchez, García-Belmar et al 2002] ou dans la transmission du savoir-faire à travers les manuels d'analyse chimique [Tomic 2017]. Les manuels sont sources de controverses et participent à la construction d'une discipline [Lundgren & Bensaude-Vincent 2000], [Bensaude-Vincent, García-Belmar et al 2003], [Clericuzio 2006], [Simon 2011].…”