"At times the success of a concept in one area of science may have a retarding effect upon progress in other areas. ..."the Law of Definite Proportions," was established... only after a long battle between Berthollet and Proust. The success of the Proust position was so decisive that the matter received little critical study during the decades which followed. Possibly this was for the best as far as the progress of chemistry was concerned. Had chemists concerned themselves with the composition of solutions, glasses, and alloys the establishment of atomic theory might have been even slower than it was."