Verbindung und Affinität

"Compounds and Affinity." (Text in German.)
The development of our concept of chemical compounds, a basic element of modern chemistry, has hardly been investigated because it has been regarded as simply a refinement of the natural-philosophical picture of the atom. This volume refutes this view and meticulously proves that the concept of compounds has its roots in the conceptual structure of the empirical knowledge aquired in the commercial chemistry of the 16th and 17th centuries. The author reconstructs the birth of scientific chemistry in a new historical, conceptual and methodological context.