;1605:Sir Francis Bacon publishes The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, which contains a description of what would later be known as the scientific method.
;1605:Michal Sedziwój publishes the alchemical treatise A New Light of Alchemy which proposed the existence of the "food of life" within air, much later recognized as oxygen.
;1615:Jean Beguin publishes the Tyrocinium Chymicum, an early chemistry textbook, and in it draws the first-ever chemical equation.
;1637:René Descartes publishes Discours de la méthode, which contains an outline of the scientific method.
;1648:Posthumous publication of the book Ortus medicinae by Jan Baptist van Helmont, which is cited by some as a major transitional work between alchemy and chemistry, and as an important influence on Robert Boyle.  The book contains the results of numerous experiments and establishes an early version of the law of conservation of mass.
;1661:Robert Boyle publishes The Sceptical Chymist, a treatise on the distinction between chemistry and alchemy.  It contains some of the earliest modern ideas of atoms, molecules, and chemical reaction, and marks the beginning of the history of modern chemistry.
;1662:Robert Boyle proposes Boyle's law, an experimentally based description of the behavior of gases, specifically the relationship between pressure and volume.
;1735:Swedish chemist Georg Brandt analyzes a dark blue pigment found in copper ore. Brandt demonstrated that the pigment contained a new element, later named cobalt.
;1754:Joseph Black isolates carbon dioxide, which he called "fixed air".
;1757:Louis Claude Cadet de Gassicourt, while investigating arsenic compounds, creates Cadet's fuming liquid, later discovered to be cacodyl oxide, considered to be the first synthetic organometallic compound.
;1758:Joseph Black formulates the concept of latent heat to explain the thermochemistry of phase changes.
;1766:Henry Cavendish discovers hydrogen as a colorless, odourless gas that burns and can form an explosive mixture with air.
;1773–1774: Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley independently isolate oxygen, called by Priestley "dephlogisticated air" and Scheele "fire air".
;1778:Antoine Lavoisier, considered "The father of modern chemistry", recognizes and names oxygen, and recognizes its importance and role in combustion.
;1787:Antoine Lavoisier publishes Méthode de nomenclature chimique, the first modern system of chemical nomenclature.
;1787:Jacques Charles proposes Charless law, a corollary of Boyles law, describes relationship between temperature and volume of a gas.
;1789:Antoine Lavoisier publishes Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, the first modern chemistry textbook.  It is a complete survey of (at that time) modern chemistry, including the first concise definition of the law of conservation of mass, and thus also represents the founding of the discipline of stoichiometry or quantitative chemical analysis.
;1797:Joseph Proust proposes the law of definite proportions, which states that elements always combine in small, whole number ratios to form compounds.
;1800:Alessandro Volta devises the first chemical battery, thereby founding the discipline of electrochemistry.