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Previous | Home | NextTable of affinities. In an early attempt to raise the sophistication level of chemistry, Étienne François Geoffroy (1672-1731) constructed a "Table des Affinités." Geoffroy took his concept of "affinity" from Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734), the proponent of phlogiston, who believed a relative ordering of "affinities" (the order in which substances displaced each other from compounds) would allow the prediction of other chemical reaction outcomes. This concept of the affinity of one substance for another was an extension of the Newtonian idea of mutual gravitational attraction of physical bodies, and was taken seriously as late as the early 19th century.
