The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

m as revelations of spiritual truths, built on them theories of things in heaven and earth (and a good many things in neither), and used them in manufacture

ay, perhaps, describe alchemy as the superficial, and what may be called subjective, examination of thes

iated that Adam was created on the sixth day, being the 15th of March, of the first year of the world; c

ges wherein substances of one kind are produced from substances totally unlike them. To inquire how those of acute intellects and much learning regarded such occurrences

y; more accurate descriptions will then be given of changes which occur in nature, or can be produced by altering the ordinary conditions, and the reader will be taught to see certain points of likeness between these changes; he will be shown how to disentangle chemical occurrences, to find their similarities and differences; and, g

e in a different world. There is nothing even remotely

otations from alc

is to say, the tinctorial spirit. The body is the ponderable, material, terrestrial thing, endowed with a shadow.... After a series of suitable treatments copper becomes without sh

al part, which resides in homogeneous water. Thus we must destroy the particular form of gold, and change it into its generic homogeneous water, in which the spirit of gold is preserved; this spirit afterwards resto

concealing outward vesture." (Mi

e, but in the virtue ... the less there is of body, the mor

at it is. These are the four pillars of the world.... It is their contrary action whic

a material: the first matter is furnished by God, t

ated from the pure; and if the pure elements are then once more joined together by the action of natural heat, a much nobler and higher form of life is produced.... If the hidden central fire, which during life

ble. Again let that which is below become that which is above; let the invisible become visible, and the impalpable bec

the macrocosm; which sidereal hot infusion, with an airy sulphurous property, descending upon inferiors, so acts and operates as that there is implanted, spiritually and invisibly, a certain power and virtue in those metals and minerals; which fume, moreover, resolves in the earth into a certain water, wherefrom all metals are thenceforth generated and ripened to their perfe

ial correspondences, to control, purify, and transform them by t

ear on account of that which conceals it.... Each one of the visi

like sentences in

arnt scraps of their language; the tribe totally disappeared; the parrot alone rema

found to embody something worth a hearing. Success is most likely to come by considering the growth of alchemy; by trying to find

the history of the attempts, and the failures, of men "to see things as they are." "Nothing is harder," said the

gs around them. And this question must have become more urgent as working in metals, making colours and dyes, preparing new kinds of food and drink, producing substances with smel

one class to another is not possible? Are all the varied substances seen, tasted, handled, smelt, composed of a limited number of essentially d

ears before Christ formed a theory of the transformations of ma

oms and a void." Those investigators attempted to connect all the differences which are observed between the qualities of things with differences of size, shape, position, and movement of atoms. They said that all things are formed by the coalescence of certain unchangeable, indestruct

tless amplified and modified, in a Latin poem, Concerning the Nature of Things, written by Lucretius, who was born a century before the begi

lse sense, be able to contradict [the senses], wholly founded as it is on the senses? And if they are not true, then all reason as well is rendered false." The first principle in nature is asserted by Lucretius to be that "Nothing is ever gotten out of nothing." "A thing never returns to not

es. Change, growth, decay, formation, disruption-these are the marks of all things. "The war of first-beginnings waged from eternity is carried on with dubious issue: now here, now there, the life-bringing elements of things get the mastery, and are o'ermastered

erent shapes, but the number of shapes is finite, because there is a limit to the number of different things we see, smell, taste,

same doctrine was taught by Lucretius, two thousand years ago. "It often makes a great difference," he said, "with what things, and in what positions the same first-beginnings are held in union, and what motions they mutually impart and receive." For instance, certain atoms may be so arranged at one time as to produce fire, and, at another time, the arrangement of the same atoms may be such that the result is a fir-tree. T

posed of not so many atoms less tightly packed, and a gas as a comparatively small number of atoms with c

f winds, heat, cold and smells; yet no one has seen the wind, or heat, or cold, or a smell. Clothes become moist when hung near the sea, and dry when spread in the sunshine; but no

ou can see, they must withdraw from sight their motion as well; and the more so, that the things which we can see do yet often conceal their motions when a great distance off. Thus, often, the woolly flocks as they crop the glad pastures on a hill, creep on whither the grass, jewelled with fresh dew, summons or invites each, and the lambs, fed to the full, gambol and playfully butt; all which objects appear to us from a distance to be blended together, and to rest like a white spot on a green hill. Again, when mighty legions fill with their movemen

e descriptions of what are now called chemical changes could not be given in terms of the theory, because no searching examination of so much as one such change had been made, nor, I think, one may say, could be made under the conditions of Greek life. More than two thousand years passed before investigators began to make accurate measurements of the quantities of th

ns were accurate, on the whole, and as far as they went, and the theory they formed was based on no trivial or accidental features of the facts, but on what has proved to be the very essence of the phenomena they sought to bring into one point of view; for all the advances made in our own times in clear knowledge of th

a mental presentation of the atmosphere in terms of the theory of atoms, rediscovered the possibility of differences between the sizes of atoms, applied this idea to the facts concerning the quantitative compositi

erimental inquiry, we should rather be full of admiring wonder at the extraordina

the nature of the thing remains unharmed." As examples of essential properties, Lucretius mentions "the weight of a stone, the heat of fire, the fluidity of water." Such things as liberty, war, slavery, riches, poverty, and the like, wer

ir theory of material changes on the difference between a supposed essential substratum of things, an

as I have given from their writings, of the alchemists' conception of the world. The Greeks likened their imaginin

drawn between this world and another world, and that other world was divided into two irreconcilable and absolutely opposite parts. Man came to be regarded as the centre of a tremendous and never-ceasing battle, urged between the powers of good and the powers of evil. The sights and sound

run through all phenomena however seemingly diverse, entering into sympathy with the supposed inner oneness of life, death, the present, past, and future. Magic grows, and gathers strength, when men are sure their theory of the universe must be the one true theory, and they see only through