  The seventeenth-century certainly witnessed the growth of a range of experimental sciences, an occurrence of considerable epistemological significance. However, the experimental basis for seventeenth-century atomism remained extremely weak and none of the various versions of it can be said to have productively informed experiment or to have been confirmed by it, a claim that has been documented by Meinel (1988) in his survey of the experimental basis for atomism in the seventeenth century and is argued in detail in Chalmers (2009). Appeal to atoms to explain the gradual wearing away of a stone, the evaporation of a liquid, the passage of a solution through a filter paper folded multiple times and so on dated back at least as far as Lucretius and were hardly sufficiently powerful to convince anyone disinclined to accept the reality of atoms. Experimental knowledge of the combination and recovery of reacting chemicals, which certainly experienced marked growth in the course of the seventeenth century, did not of itself warrant the assumption that atoms were involved. Evidence revealed by the microscope was new to the seventeenth century, of course, and did reveal a microscopic world previously unknown. But the properties of microscopic systems were not qualitatively distinct from macroscopic ones in a way that aided the demonstration of the emergence of the properties of observable systems, whether microscopic or macroscopic, from the properties of atoms.