Lavoisier may have been the leader of the chemical revolution that led to the new chemistry, but Berzelius was the "organizer of the science" [6]. His research was done at the college of medicine in Stockholm, Sweden. His most important work, done in the period 1807 to 1826, was the determination of accurate atomic weights. He argued that letters should be used for chemical symbols; nearly all those he suggested are in use today. His electrochemical investigations led to the dualistic theory of chemical combination. He edited a popular journal, Jahresberichte, through which he became the "veritable law-giver of chemistry" [7].

When dualism was superceded by a unitary view of matter in the mid-19th century, Berzelius did not change his views. He was a champion of dualism to the end.