The Confirmation of Black's Theory of Lime

In 1756 Joseph Black published a new theory of the nature of lime, one that is now viewed as essentially correct. Black's theory was not immediately accepted, and a competing theory, published in 1764 by Johann Meyer, was widely preferred to Black's for some years. In this paper, probability theory is used to show that, and why, some of Black's evidence made his theory more probable than Meyer's.