Elusive Proteus: carbon dioxide unearthed -Joseph Black, James Hutton and the discovery of fixed air, limestone dissolution and cave morphology in eighteenth-century Britain

摘要

Natural philosophers working in chemistry during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, perceived a gas drawn from burnt wood or decaying or fermenting vegetation, and described it as "fixed air". Medical experiments designed to dissolve kidney and bladder stones within the human body prompted development of techniques to weigh and measure materials with precision, enabling the identification of fixed air, later to be re-named carbon dioxide. Through wide-ranging social interactions and the communication of experimental reports, the chemists' laboratory discoveries were transferred and applied in fieldwork by geologists. The work of the chemist Joseph Black, and the geologist James Hutton laid the foundations for the geological theory of uniformitarianism and an understanding of the corrosion of limestone and the formation of caves and karst phenomena.