Rouelle was offered the position of apothecary to the king, but declined the honour as it would have involved the abandonment of his lectures. His chief published work was the classification of salts into neutral, acid, and basic. He also closely investigated medicinal plants, and got so near to the discovery of alkaloids as the separation of what he called the immediate principles, making a number of vegetable extracts.
Etienne François Geoffrey (born 1672, died 1731), the son of a Paris apothecary, himself of high reputation, for it was at his house that the first meetings were held which resulted in the formation of the Academy of Sciences, studied pharmacy at Montpellier, and qualified there. Returning to Paris he went through the medical course and submitted for his doctorate three theses which show the bent of his mind. The first examined whether all diseases have one origin and can be cured by one remedy, the second aimed to prove that the philosophic physician must also be an operative chemist, and the third dealt with the inquiry whether man had developed from a worm. Geoffrey was attached as physician to the English embassy for some time and was elected to the Royal Society of London. Afterwards he became professor of medicine and pharmacy at the College of France. His chief works were pharmacological researches on iron, on vitriol, on fermentation, and on some mineral waters. He wrote a notable treatise on Materia Medica.
Albert Seba was an apothecary of Amsterdam, who spent some part of his early life in the Dutch Indies. He was born in 1668 and died in 1736. He was particularly noted for a great collection illustrating all
