If the experimental procedure has been the right guiding star in the theory of proportions and the extension it has won on all sides since Richter, then all the more does the mixture of these great discoveries contrast with the wasteland of the so called corpuscular theory, which lies outside the path of experience; only this forsaking, at the start, of the principle of experience could have motivated taking up again the notion, already advanced earlier especially by Ritter, of establishing fixed orders of electro positive and electro negative bodies which would have chemical meaning at the same time.