"Though Lavoisier generally gets credit for the authorship of this principle [ conservation of mass ], others had conceived it before him, The seventeenth century chemists, notably Helmont, Starkey, and Boyle, had a dawning awareness of the importance of weighing and measuring materials before and after an experimental process, though their methods and measurement devices were not so precise. In 1623, Francis Bacon declared, "..when they perceive that a body which was before manifest to the senses has escaped and disappeared, they should not admit or liquidate the account before it has been shown to them where the body has gone to and into what it has been received." And as early as 450 B.C., Anaxagoras argued, "Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of preexisting things; so that all becoming might more correctly be called becoming mixed, and all corruption, becoming separate.""
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Madison Smartt Bell, Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution 2005
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier
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Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794) was a French intellectual and nobleman, widely regarded as the founder of modern chemistry.
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