The latter stages of the revolution was fuelled by the 1789 publication of Lavoisiers Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry).  Beginning with this publication and others to follow, Lavoisier synthesised the work of others  and coined the term "oxygen". Antoine Lavoisier represented the chemical revolution not only in his publications, but also in the way he practiced chemistry. Lavoisiers work was characterized by his systematic determination of weights and his strong emphasis on precision and accuracy. While it has been postulated that the law of conservation of mass was discovered by Lavoisier, this claim has been refuted by scientist Marcellin Berthelot. Earlier use of the law of conservation of mass has been suggested by Henry Guerlac, noting that scientist Jan Baptist van Helmont had implicitly applied the methodology to his work in the 16th and 17th centuries. Earlier references of the law of conservation of mass and its use were made by Jean Rey in 1630. Although the law of conservation of mass was not explicitly discovered by Lavoisier, his work with a wider array of materials than what most scientists had available at the time allowed his work to greatly expand the boundaries of the principle and its fundamentals.
Lavoisier also contributed to chemistry a method of understanding combustion and respiration and proof of the composition of water by decomposition into its constituent parts. He explained the theory of combustion, and challenged the phlogiston theory with his views on caloric.  The Traité incorporates notions of a "new chemistry" and describes the experiments and reasoning that led to his conclusions.  Like Newtons Principia, which was the high point of the Scientific Revolution, Lavoisiers Traité can be seen as the culmination of the Chemical Revolution.
Lavoisiers work was not immediately accepted and it took several decades for it gain momentum.  This transition was aided by the work of  Jöns Jakob Berzelius, who came up with a simplified shorthand to describe chemical compounds based on John Daltons theory of atomic weights. Many people credit Lavoisier and his overthrow of phlogiston theory as the traditional chemical revolution, with Lavoisier marking the beginning of the revolution and John Dalton marking its culmination.