"When Priestley described his discovery... he introduced... an open admission of the role of randomness in his work—even including a subtle dig at the theoretical, synthetic mode of Newton and his followers:More is owing to what we call chance... to the observation of events arising from unknown causes, than to any proper design, or preconceived theory in this business. ......But ...Priestley himself was trapped in a preconceived theory ...almost entirely unfounded, though he clung to it for the rest of his life. ...Priestley seared it directly into the name he gave his pure air: dephlogisticated air. That awkward name came from the closest thing to a dominant research paradigm in... : the phlogiston theory, one of the all-time classics in the history of human error."