  The fact that Newtonian atomism offered little that was of practical utility to chemistry became increasingly recognised by chemists as the eighteenth century progressed. The culmination of the experimental program involving the investigation of the combination and analysis of chemical substances was, of course, Lavoisier's system involving chemical elements. But whatever sympathy Lavoisier may have had for Newtonian atomism of the kind championed by Laplace, he was at pains to distance his new chemistry from it. Substances provisionally classified as elements were those that could not be broken down into something simpler in the laboratory. Progress in eighteenth-century chemistry led away from rather than towards atomism. It was not until Dalton that the situation changed early in the nineteenth century.