href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@14218@[email protected]#figfp" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Frontispiece

1. THE MORTIFICATION OF METALS PRESENTED BY THE IMAGE OF A KING DEVOURING HIS SON 66 2 and 3. THE MORTIFICATION OF METALS PRESENTED BY IMAGES OF DEATH AND BURIAL 67,68 4 and 5. TWO MUST BE CONJOINED TO PRODUCE ONE 70,71 6. HERMETICALLY SEALING THE NECK OF A GLASS VESSEL 80 7. SEALING BY MEANS OF A MERCURY TRAP 81 8. AN ALCHEMICAL COMMON COLD STILL 82 9. A BALNEUM MARIÆ 84 10. ALCHEMICAL DISTILLING APPARATUS 85 11. A PELICAN 88 12. AN ALCHEMIST WITH A RETORT 89 13. AN ALCHEMIST PREPARING OIL OF VITRIOL 92 14. ALCHEMICAL APPARATUS FOR RECTIFYING SPIRITS 93 15. PURIFYING GOLD PRESENTED BY THE IMAGE OF A SALAMANDER IN THE FIRE 104 16. PRIESTLEY'S APPARATUS FOR WORKING WITH GASES 145 17. APPARATUS USED BY LAVOISIER IN HIS EXPERIMENTS ON BURNING MERCURY IN AIR 156

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THE STORY OF ALCHEMY
AND
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHEMISTRY.

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CHAPTER I

THE EXPLANATION OF MATERIAL CHANGES GIVEN BY THE GREEK THINKERS.

For thousands of years before men had any accurate and exact knowledge of the changes of material things, they had thought about these changes, regarded them 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 manufactures, arts, and handicrafts, especially in one very curious manufacture wherein not the thousandth fragment of a grain of the finished article was ever produced.

The accurate and systematic study of the changes which material things undergo is called chemistry; we may, perhaps, describe alchemy as the superficial, and what may be called subjective, examination of these changes, and the speculative systems, and imaginary arts and manufactures, founded on that examination.

We are assured by many old writers that Adam was the first alchemist, and we are told by one of the initiated that Adam was created on the sixth day, being the 15th of March, of the first year of the world; certainly alchemy had a long life, for chemistry did not begin until about the middle of the 18th century.

No branch of science has had so long a period of incubation as chemistry. There must be some extraordinary difficulty in the way of disentangling the steps of those changes 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 in the times when man's outlook on the world was very different from what it is now, ought to be interesting, and the results of that inquiry must surely be instructive.

If the reader turns to a modern book on chemistry (for instance, The Story of the Chemical Elements, in this series), he will find, at first, superficial descriptions of special instances of those occurrences which are the subject of the chemist's study; he will learn that only certain parts of such events are dealt with in chemistry; 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, gradually, he will feel his way to general statements, which are more or less rigorous and accurate expressions of what holds good in a large number of chemical processes; finally, he will discover that some generalisations have been made which are exact and completely accurate descriptions applicable to every case of chemical change.

But if we turn to the writings of the alchemists, we are in a different world. There is nothing even remotely resembling what one finds in a modern book on chemistry.

Here are a few quotations from alchemical writings¹: