Can it be? Three chemistry tables? Will he do it?

Here's another table. At one level, this is clearly of a different sort than the other ones I put up (like Geoffroy 1718, and Bergman 1775). This one is linguistic, not symbolic. It has words, not alchemical symbols. But on another level, it is similar in its efforts to organize how substances combine and, in a way, relate to one another. So freshen up on your French and take a look at this detail from a much larger table:

And click here for an expanded, full version.

The later eighteenth-century was long studied as the "Chemical Revolution," and it used to be that such a label meant those later 1700s when Lavoisier threw down Phlogiston and gave us Oxygen. The Birth of Modern Chemistry. Triumph! Now, it's not that simple, and the way historians study the history of chemistry has evolved over the past decades. But, without having to get into all that, the above is a chemistry table that was meant, more or less, to serve the same function as the earlier ones. As one scholar has said, and I think quite astutely, "the table was the storehouse and preferred form of presentation for the new nomenclature, a system that would guide chemical activity from reliance and adherence to a single referential system."

(For starters, if you're looking for more here, try William Brock's The Chemical Tree. Or try Trevor Levere's Transforming Matter, it's much shorter. Or try A History of Chemistry by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, because it's good, and because I love saying their names. Bensaude-Vincent. Bensaude-Vincent.)

(Also, above, when I say "the same" and "more or less," those are the parts where how close the same is, and what's more and what's less, depends on how you examine the used-to-be-called chemical revolution. Example: was the chemical revolution a break from the workshop tradition from which those earlier tables were built? Or was it a linguistic event, of providing new ways to write about and describe chemical phenomena? Or was it the new philosophical traditions of the high enlightenment, which may or may not the same as talking about linguistics? All I'm saying here is, don't ask me. Just know that the answer isn't: 'they used to be so stupid as to think Phlogiston was the thing that caused things to burn, but then they got smart and realized that old idea was stupid, and that oxygen was the explanation.')

The table here, then, is still all about representing the language of science. How did people organize the different substances (they didn't call them elements yet)? How were they related to one another? Stuff like that. That's what you'd be asking if you were one of them.