The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

Renew：Part 11
Author：M. M. Pattison Muir
Update：08-15-2023
Tags：Professional Technical
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Chapter List

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter IV. I endeavoured to a.n.a.lyse two terms which were constantly used by the alchemists to convey ideas of great importance, the terms _Element_ and _Principle_. That attempt sufficed, at any rate, to show the vagueness of the ideas which these terms were intended to express, and to make evident the inconsistencies between the meanings given to the words by different alchemical writers. The story quoted in Chapter III., from Michael Sendivogius, ill.u.s.trates the difficulty which the alchemists themselves had in understanding what they meant by the term _Mercury_; yet there is perhaps no word more often used by them than that. Some of them evidently took it to mean the substance then, and now, called mercury; the results of this literal interpretation were disastrous; others thought of mercury as a substance which could be obtained, or, at any rate, might be obtained, by repeatedly distilling ordinary mercury, both alone and when mixed with other substances; others used the word to mean a hypothetical something which was liquid but did not wet things, limpid yet capable of becoming solid, volatile yet able to prevent the volatilisation of other things, and white, yet ready to cause other white things to change their colour; they thought of this something, this soul of mercury, as having properties without itself being tangible, as at once a substance and not a substance, at once a bodily spirit and a spiritual body.
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter VI., I said that when an alchemist boiled water in an open vessel, and obtained a white earthy solid, in place of the water which disappeared, he was producing some sort of experimental proof of the justness of his a.s.sertion that water can be changed into earth.
Chapter IV. of _The Story of the Chemical Elements_.
Chapter 11