More than twenty years ago, the late Carleton Perrin likened the current state of our scholarly understanding of the Chemical Revolution to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. While historians of this complex event have a shared sense of being in the presence of a great beast, they mistake the part each of them has touched for the whole thing and hence cannot agree on its nature or identity. As a historical event, the Chemical Revolution is readily identified. It occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century and involved some of the finest scientific minds of Europe in an upheaval of considerable scope and consequence. What is not so easy to determine is the meaning or significance of this event, both for its participants and for subsequent commentators. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians of chemistry identified the Chemical Revolution with the conflict between the English natural philosopher Joseph Priestley and the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier over the nature of combustion, with Priestley defending the traditional view that burning substances emit ‘phlogiston’ (the principle of inflammability) against Lavoisier's innovative suggestion that they absorb oxygen. But the issues joined in this debate went well beyond the question of the empirical adequacy of competing scientific explanations, encompassing methodological, epistemological, ontological, linguistic and institutional issues that related to the very identity of chemistry as a scientific discipline.