Essay on the Cause of Chemical Proportions, and on Some Circumstances Relating to Them; Together with a Short and Easy Method of Expressing Them

Essay on the Cause of Chemical Proportions, by Jons Jacob Berzelius, published across several 1813 issues of Annals of Philosophy, is the Swedish chemist's own primary paper introducing the alphabetic chemical notation still used today, letters standing for elements with numeric subscripts for their combining proportions, replacing the pictorial symbols earlier chemists like Dalton had used. Its strength is that it is Berzelius's own foundational statement in his own words, the actual origin of a notation system that became permanent scientific infrastructure, useful here wherever the atlas needs the primary source for how modern chemical formula writing began rather than a secondhand summary of it. Its limit is that it is a technical chemistry paper from a period when the periodic table and atomic theory itself were still being worked out, so its specific atomic weight figures and some chemical claims have since been superseded, and it should be cited for the notation system's origin rather than for present day chemical fact.