Conservation Law of Lavoisier

The quotation given on the title page of Holleman's review article is my translation of Holleman's Dutch quotation of what, in fact, appears to be a direct translation from the 1790 English translation of Lavoisier's 1789 Trait�:

"We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the same; and nothing takes place beyond changes and modifications in the combination of these elements."

Lavoisier's original text actually stated the case somewhat less definitevely:

"Rien ne se cr�e, ni dans les op�rations de l�art, ni dans celles de la nature, et l�on peut poser en principe que, dans toute op�ration, il y a une �gale quantit� de mati�re avant et apr�s l�op�ration; que la qualit� et la quantit� des principes sont les m�mes et qu�il n�y a que des changements, des modifications."

This translates into English as

"Nothing is created, either via artificial processes or those of nature, and we can state as a principle that, in every process, there is an equal amount of matter before and after the process; that the quality and the quantity of the elements remain unchanged and that there are only alterations or modifications."

This may be reformulated as "Matter is neither created nor destroyed." Lavoisier was not the first to state this, but he was the first to conduct quantitative experiments to demonstrate his belief in this statement. It is more generally known as Lavosier's Law or the Law of Conservation of Mass (or Matter).

Further pages are intended to be written on this subject; meanwhile a useful introduction to the fundamental laws of convenventional chemistry, with plenty of useful links, may be found via 'Wikipedia', the (multilingual) free encyclopedia.