Abstract
THE great majority of biographies may be divided into two classes: those that tell us what a man did, and those that show us what a man was. Mr. Cochrane's life of Lavoisier is a very competent example of the former, in which the story flows smoothly and evenly, while a due sense of proportion is maintained throughout. If we are left at the end with the feeling that we still do not know what manner of man Lavoisier was, we must nevertheless gratefully acknowledge that the main facts of his life and work have never before been so adequately described in the English language. It has, indeed, been a reproach to us and to our American cousins that, while the adjudication between the relative claims of Lavoisier, Priestley, Cavendish, Watt, and others has always excited considerable interest among us, no complete or even moderately complete biography of the great Frenchman had been written in our tongue. This omission is all the more remarkable in that many historians of chemistry must have been in a position to repair it with very little additional labour to themselves. Happily, the reproach is now expunged, and though Mr. Cochrane would probably be the first to admit that the definitive biography is still to be written, he deserves our warmest thanks for his clear and unbiased account of Lavoisier's career.
Lavoisier.
By J. A. Cochrane. Pp. xiii + 264 + 8 plates. (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1931.) 7s. 6d. net.
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HOLMYARD, E. Lavoisier. Nature 129, 598–599 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129598a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129598a0
