"Sir, I did not know about the book of John Rey until after I published through your Journal, the second part of my experiments on mercurial lime. So I could not talk about it in the very brief enumeration that I then made of the different opinions on the cause of the increase in gravity of metallic lime. My fault, however involuntary it may have been, must be repaired and, in order to do so, I hasten to do justice to an Author who, by the depth of his speculations, has succeeded in pointing out the real cause of this increase. Might you, Sir, work with me to make known the excellent work of Jean Rey? Your Journal is read throughout France and is recognized in foreign countries. If you wanted to insert the attached leaflet into it, chemists in all countries would know in a short time that it was a Frenchman who, by the force of his genius and his reflections, was the first to guess the cause of the increase in weight which certain metals undergo when, on exposing them to the action of fire, they are converted into lime, and that this cause is precisely the same as that the truth of which has just been demonstrated by the experiments which M. Lavoisier has read at the last public meeting of the Academy of Sciences."
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, Letter to M. L'Abbé Rozier (January, 1775)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Rey
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John Rey
1583 – 1645
John Rey (1583–1645) (or, in French) Jean Rey, was a physician of , France who in 1630 published a tract on , or of metals, after being notified by Brun, an apothecary of Bergerac, France, of Brun's experiments (as early as 1629) on the calcination of tin. Brun had melted 2 pounds six ounces of tin, and after 6 hours the resulting calx weighed seven ounces more than the original tin. More than one hundred and forty years before Antoine Lavoisier, John Rey recognized that in the calcination of le
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