Historical Chemistry Library Wows Scholars in Science News May
15, 2004 - Washington, D.C. From Science News The Chemical
Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia has acquired one of the most
extensive and valuable collections of chemistry texts in the
world. It was bought from private collector Robert Neville, now
a retired chemist in California, who began amassing rare
chemistry volumes as an undergraduate student 60 years ago. The
collection has since grown to include more than 6,000 works
spanning 6 centuries. Aside from the historical holdings of the
British Museum in London, "I can't think of anything else that
compares with this collection," says Lawrence Principe, a
chemistry historian at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Some of the most important volumes include The Sceptical Chymist
(1661) in which Robert Boyle defines the term element, Antoine
Lavoisier's Traite Elementaire de Chimie (1789), which gave rise
to modern chemistry, and Dmitri Mendeleev's 1856 master's thesis
from the University of St.