"A true hypothesis, or one in the main, true, is always found capable of explaining more than it professed or expected to explain. But the phlogiston hypothesis transgressed its own self-imposed conditions, and failed to explain the most simple and essential phenomena of combustion. Thus its presence in bodies was held to confer upon them combustibility, yet when transferred from a blazing combustible to air, instead of rendering the latter inflammable, and changing it into a gas which could be kindled, it changed it into one which was totally incombustible and at once extinguished flame; for phlogisticated air in its simplest form was our ."