万物简史 第132期:基本物质(4)

（单词翻译）

 　　Although chemistry had come a long way in the century that separated Newton and Boyle from Scheele and Priestley and Henry Cavendish, it still had a long way to go. Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley's case a little beyond) scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren't there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine¹ acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion². Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious elan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life.