AN ALCHEMICAL LABORATORY

THE STORY OF ALCHEMY AND
THE BEGINNINGS OF
CHEMISTRY

BY

M. M. PATTISON MUIR, M.A.

FELLOW AND FORMERLY PRÆLECTOR IN CHEMISTRY OF GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

WITH EIGHTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION

“It is neither religious nor wise to judge that of which you know nothing.”
A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby, by PHILALETHES (17th century)

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• The Empire. By E. SALMON.
• King Alfred. By Sir WALTER BESANT.
• Lost England. By BECKLES WILLSON.
• Alchemy, or The Beginnings of Chemistry. By M.M. PATTISON MUIR, M.A.
• The Chemical Elements. By M.M. PATTISON MUIR, M.A.
• The Wanderings of Atoms. By M.M. PATTISON MUIR, M.A.
• Germ Life: Bacteria. By H.W. CONN.
• Life in the Seas. By SIDNEY J. HICKSON F.R.S.
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PREFACE.

The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of
Chemistry is very interesting in itself. It is also
a pregnant example of the contrast between the
scientific and the emotional methods of regarding
nature; and it admirably illustrates the differences between
well-grounded, suggestive, hypotheses, and baseless speculations.

I have tried to tell the story so that it may be intelligible to the
ordinary reader.

M.M. PATTISON MUIR.

CAMBRIDGE, November 1902.

NOTE TO NEW EDITION.

A few small changes have been made. The
last chapter has been re-written
and considerably enlarged.

M.M.P.M.

FARNHAM, September 1913.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE STORY OF ALCHEMY
AND
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHEMISTRY.

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:

These sayings read like sentences in a forgotten
tongue.

Humboldt tells of a parrot which had lived
with a tribe of American Indians, and learnt
scraps of their language; the tribe totally disappeared;
the parrot alone remained, and
babbled words in the language which no living
human being could understand.

Are the words I have quoted unintelligible,
like the parrot’s prating? Perhaps the language
may be reconstructed; perhaps it may be found
to embody something worth a hearing. Success
is most likely to come by considering the growth
of alchemy; by trying to find the ideas which
were expressed in the strange tongue; by endeavouring
to look at our surroundings as the
alchemists looked at theirs.

Do what we will, we always, more or less,
construct our own universe. The history of
science may be described as the history of the
attempts, and the failures, of men “to see things
as they are.” “Nothing is harder,” said the
Latin poet Lucretius, “than to separate manifest
facts from doubtful, what straightway the
mind adds on of itself.”

Observations of the changes which are constantly
happening in the sky, and on the earth,
must have prompted men long ago to ask whether
there are any limits to the changes of things
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
smells and tastes unlike those of familiar objects,
and other pursuits like these, made men
acquainted with transformations which seemed
to penetrate to the very foundations of things.

Can one thing be changed into any other
thing; or, are there classes of things within each of
which change is possible, while the passage
from one class to another is not possible? Are all
the varied substances seen, tasted, handled,
smelt, composed of a limited number of essentially
different things; or, is each fundamentally different
from every other substance? Such
questions as these must have pressed for answers
long ago.

Some of the Greek philosophers who lived four
or five hundred years before Christ formed a
theory of the transformations of matter, which is
essentially the theory held by naturalists to-day.

These philosophers taught that to understand
nature we must get beneath the superficial
qualities of things. “According to convention,” said
Democritus (born 460 B.C.), “there are a sweet
and a bitter, a hot and a cold, and according to
convention there is colour. In truth there are
atoms 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, indestructible,
and impenetrable particles which they named
atoms; the total number of atoms is constant;
not one of them can be destroyed, nor can
one be created; when a substance ceases to exist and
another is formed, the process is not a destruction
of matter, it is a re-arrangement of atoms.

Only fragments of the writings of the founders
of the atomic theory have come to us. The views
of these philosophers are preserved, and doubtless
amplified and modified, in a Latin poem, Concerning
the Nature of Things, written by Lucretius,
who was born a century before the beginning
of our era. Let us consider the picture given in
that poem of the material universe, and the
method whereby the picture was produced.²

All knowledge, said Lucretius, is based on
“the aspect and the law of nature.” True knowledge
can be obtained only by the use of the
senses; there is no other method. “From the
senses first has proceeded the knowledge of the
true, and the senses cannot be refuted. Shall
reason, founded on false 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 nothing, but all things
after disruption go back to the first bodies of
matter.” If there were not imperishable seeds
of things, atoms, “first-beginnings of solid singleness,”
then, Lucretius urges, “infinite time gone
by and lapse of days must have eaten up all
things that are of mortal body.”

The first-beginnings, or atoms, of things were
thought of by Lucretius as always moving;
“there is no lowest point in the sum of the
universe” where they can rest; they meet, clash,
rebound, or sometimes join together into groups
of atoms which move about as wholes. 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 in turn; with the funeral
wail blends the cry which babies raise when they
enter the borders of light; and no night ever
followed day, nor morning night, that heard not,
mingling with the sickly infant’s cries, the attendants’
wailings on death and black funeral.”

Lucretius pictured the atoms of things as like
the things perceived by the senses; he said that
atoms of different kinds have different shapes,
but the number of shapes is finite, because there
is a limit to the number of different things we
see, smell, taste, and handle; he implies, although
I do not think he definitely asserts, that all atoms
of one kind are identical in every respect.

We now know that many compounds exist
which are formed by the union of the same quantities
by weight of the same elements, and, nevertheless,
differ in properties; modern chemistry
explains this fact by saying that the properties
of a substance depend, not only on the kind of
atoms which compose the minute particles of a
compound, and the number of atoms of each
kind, but also on the mode of arrangement of
the atoms.³ The 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. The differences between the
colours of things are said by Lucretius to be due
to differences in the arrangements and motions
of atoms. As the colour of the sea when wind
lashes it into foam is different from the colour
when the waters are at rest, so do the colours
of things change when the atoms whereof the things
are composed change from one arrangement to
another, or from sluggish movements to rapid
and tumultuous motions.

Lucretius pictured a solid substance as a vast
number of atoms squeezed closely together, a
liquid as composed of not so many atoms less
tightly packed, and a gas as a comparatively
small number of atoms with considerable freedom
of motion. Essentially the same picture is presented
by the molecular theory of to-day.

To meet the objection that atoms are invisible,
and therefore cannot exist, Lucretius enumerates
many things we cannot see although we know
they exist. No one doubts the existence of
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
one has seen the moisture entering or leaving
the clothes. A pavement trodden by many feet
is worn away; but the minute particles are removed
without our eyes being able to see them.

Another objector urges—”You say the atoms
are always moving, yet the things we look at,
which you assert to be vast numbers of moving
atoms, are often motionless.” Him Lucretius
answers by an analogy. “And herein you need
not wonder at this, that though the first-beginnings
of things are all in motion, yet the sum is
seen to rest in supreme repose, unless when a
thing exhibits motions with its individual body.
For all the nature of first things lies far away
from our senses, beneath their ken; and, therefore,
since they are themselves beyond what you
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 movements all parts of the
plains, waging the mimicry of war, the glitter
lifts itself up to the sky, and the whole earth
round gleams with brass, and beneath a noise is
raised by the mighty tramplings of men, and the
mountains, stricken by the shouting, echo the
voices to the stars of heaven, and horsemen fly
about, and suddenly wheeling, scour across the
middle of the plains, shaking them with the
vehemence of their charge. And yet there is
some spot on the high hills, seen from which
they appear to stand still and to rest on the
plains as a bright spot.”

The atomic theory of the Greek thinkers was
constructed by reasoning on natural phenomena.
Lucretius constantly appeals to observed facts
for confirmation of his theoretical teachings, or
refutation of opinions he thought erroneous.
Besides giving a general mental presentation of
the material universe, the theory was applied
to many specific transmutations; but minute
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 the
substances which take part in those changes
wherein certain things seem to be destroyed
and other totally different things to be produced;
until accurate knowledge had been obtained of
the quantities of the definite substances which
interact in the transformations of matter, the
atomic theory could not do more than draw the
outlines of a picture of material changes.

A scientific theory has been described as “the
likening of our imaginings to what we actually
observe.” So long as we observe only in the
rough, only in a broad and general way, our
imaginings must also be rough, broad, and general.
It was the great glory of the Greek thinkers
about natural events that their observations 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 the transformations of
matter have been made by using, as a guide to
experimental inquiries, the conception that the
differences between the qualities of substances
are connected with differences in the weights
and movements of minute particles; and this
was the central idea of the atomic theory of the
Greek philosophers.

The atomic theory was used by the great
physicists of the later Renaissance, by Galileo,
Gassendi, Newton and others. Our own countryman,
John Dalton, while trying (in the early
years of the 19th century) to form 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
compositions of compounds which had been
established by others, developed a method for
determining the relative weights of
atoms of different kinds, and started chemistry on the
course which it has followed so successfully.

Instead of blaming the Greek philosophers for
lack of quantitatively accurate experimental inquiry,
we should rather be full of admiring
wonder at the extraordinary acuteness of their
mental vision, and the soundness of their scientific
spirit.

The ancient atomists distinguished the essential
properties of things from their accidental features.
The former cannot be removed, Lucretius said,
without “utter destruction accompanying the
severance”; the latter may be altered “while
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, were accounted accidents. Time also was
said to be an accident: it “exists not by itself;
but simply from the things which happen, the sense
apprehends what has been done in time
past, as well as what is present, and what is to
follow after.”

As our story proceeds, we shall see that the
chemists of the middle ages, the alchemists,
founded their theory of material changes on the
difference between a supposed essential substratum
of things, and their qualities which could be taken
off, they said, and put on, as clothes are removed
and replaced.

How different from the clear, harmonious,
orderly, Greek scheme, is any picture we can
form, from such quotations as I have given from
their writings, of the alchemists’ conception of the
world. The Greeks likened their imaginings of
nature to the natural facts they observed; the
alchemists created an imaginary world after their own
likeness.

While Christianity was superseding the old
religions, and the theological system of the
Christian Church was replacing the cosmogonies
of the heathen, the contrast between the
power of evil and the power of good was more fully
realised than in the days of the Greeks; a
sharper division was 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 sounds of nature were
regarded as the vestments, or the voices, of the
unseen combatants. Life was at once very real
and the mere shadow of a dream. The conditions
were favourable to the growth of magic; for man
was regarded as the measure of the universe, the
central figure in an awful tragedy.

Magic is an attempt, by thinking and speculating
about what we consider must be the order of
nature, to discover some means of penetrating
into the secret life of natural things, of realising
the hidden powers and virtues of things, grasping
the concealed thread of unity which is supposed
to 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
the glasses which their theory supplies. “He
who knows himself thoroughly knows God and
all the mysteries of His nature,” says a modern
writer on magic. That saying expresses the
fundamental hypothesis, and the method, of
all systems of magic and mysticism. Of such
systems, alchemy was one.

CHAPTER II.

A SKETCH OF ALCHEMICAL THEORY.

The system which began to be called alchemy in
the 6th and 7th centuries of our era had no
special name before that time, but was known as
the sacred art, the divine science, the occult
science, the art of Hermes.

A commentator on Aristotle, writing in the
4th century A.D., calls certain instruments used
for fusion and calcination “chuika organa,” that
is, instruments for melting and pouring. Hence,
probably, came the adjective chyic or chymic, and,
at a somewhat later time, the word chemia as the
name of that art which deals with calcinations,
fusions, meltings, and the like. The writer of a
treatise on astrology, in the 5th century, speaking
of the influences of the stars on the dispositions
of man, says: “If a man is born under Mercury
he will give himself to astronomy; if Mars, he
will follow the profession of arms; if Saturn, he
will devote himself to the science of alchemy
(Scientia alchemiae).” The word alchemia which
appears in this treatise, was formed by prefixing
the Arabic al (meaning the) to chemia, a word, as
we have seen, of Greek origin.

It is the growth, development, and transformation
into chemistry, of this alchemia which we
have to consider.

Alchemy, that is, the art of melting, pouring,
and transforming, must necessarily pay much
attention to working with crucibles, furnaces,
alembics, and other vessels wherein things are
fused, distilled, calcined, and dissolved. The
old drawings of alchemical operations show
us men busy calcining, cohobating, distilling,
dissolving, digesting, and performing other
processes of like character to these.

The alchemists could not be accused of laziness
or aversion to work in their laboratories. Paracelsus
(16th century) says of them: “They are
not given to idleness, nor go in a proud habit,
or plush and velvet garments, often showing
their rings on their fingers, or wearing swords
with silver hilts by their sides, or fine and gay
gloves on their hands; but diligently follow
their labours, sweating whole days and nights by
their furnaces. They do not spend their time
abroad for recreation, but take delight in their
laboratories. They put their fingers among coals,
into clay and filth, not into gold rings. They
are sooty and black, like smiths and miners, and
do not pride themselves upon clean and beautiful faces.”

In these respects the chemist of to-day faithfully
follows the practice of the alchemists who
were his predecessors. You can nose a
chemist in a crowd by the smell of the laboratory
which hangs about him; you can pick him out
by the stains on his hands and clothes. He also
“takes delight in his laboratory”; he does not
always “pride himself on a clean and beautiful
face”; he “sweats whole days and nights by his furnace.”

Why does the chemist toil so eagerly? Why
did the alchemists so untiringly pursue their
quest? I think it is not unfair to say: the
chemist experiments in order that he “may liken his
imaginings to the facts which he
observes”; the alchemist toiled that he might
liken the facts which he observed to his
imaginings. The difference may be put in another
way by saying: the chemist’s object is to
discover “how changes happen in combinations of the
unchanging”; the alchemist’s
endeavour was to prove the truth of his
fundamental assertion, “that every substance
contains undeveloped resources and potentialities,
and can be brought outward and forward into perfection.”

Looking around him, and observing the
changes of things, the alchemist was deeply impressed
by the growth and modification of
plants and animals; he argued that minerals and
metals also grow, change, develop. He said in
effect: “Nature is one, there must be unity in
all the diversity I see. When a grain of corn
falls into the earth it dies, but this dying is the
first step towards a new life; the dead seed is
changed into the living plant. So it must be
with all other things in nature: the mineral, or
the metal, seems dead when it is buried in the
earth, but, in reality, it is growing, changing,
and becoming more perfect.” The perfection of the
seed is the plant. What is the perfection of
the common metals? “Evidently,” the alchemist
replied, “the perfect metal is gold; the
common metals are trying to become gold.”
“Gold is the intention of Nature in regard to all
metals,” said an alchemical writer. Plants are
preserved by the preservation of their seed.
“In like manner,” the alchemist’s argument
proceeded, “there must be a seed in metals
which is their essence; if I can separate the
seed and bring it under the proper conditions, I
can cause it to grow into the perfect metal.”
“Animal life, and human life also,” we may
suppose the alchemist saying, “are continued
by the same method as that whereby the life of
plants is continued; all life springs from seed;
the seed is fructified by the union of the male and
the female; in metals also there must be the two
characters; the union of these is needed for the
production of new metals; the conjoining of
metals must go before the birth of the perfect metal.”

“Now,” we may suppose the argument to proceed,
“now, the passage from the imperfect to
the more perfect is not easy. It is harder to
practise virtue than to acquiesce in vice; virtue
comes not naturally to man; that he may gain
the higher life, he must be helped by grace.
Therefore, the task of exalting the purer metals
into the perfect gold, of developing the lower
order into the higher, is not easy. If Nature
does this, she does it slowly and painfully; if
the exaltation of the common metals to a higher
plane is to be effected rapidly, it can be done
only by the help of man.”

So far as I can judge from their writings, the
argument of the alchemists may be rendered by
some such form as the foregoing. A careful
examination of the alchemical argument shows
that it rests on a (supposed) intimate knowledge
of nature’s plan of working, and the certainty that
simplicity is the essential mark of that plan.

That the alchemists were satisfied of the great
simplicity of nature, and their own knowledge
of the ways of nature’s work, is apparent from their
writings.

The author of The New Chemical Light
(17th century) says: “Simplicity is the
seal of truth…. Nature is wonderfully simple,
and the characteristic mark of a childlike simplicity
is stamped upon all that is true and
noble in Nature.” In another place the same
author says: “Nature is one, true, simple, self-contained,
created of God, and informed with
a certain universal spirit.” The same author,
Michael Sendivogius, remarks: “It may be
asked how I come to have this knowledge
about heavenly things which are far removed
beyond human ken. My answer is that the
sages have been taught by God that this natural
world is only an image and material copy of a
heavenly and spiritual pattern; that the very
existence of this world is based upon the
reality of its heavenly archetype…. Thus
the sage sees heaven reflected in Nature as in
a mirror, and he pursues this Art, not for the
sake of gold or silver, but for the love of the
knowledge which it reveals.”

The Only True Way advises all who wish to
become true alchemists to leave the circuitous
paths of pretended philosophers, and to follow
nature, which is simple; the complicated
processes described in books are said to be the
traps laid by the “cunning sophists” to catch
the unwary.

In A Catechism of Alchemy, Paracelsus asks:
“What road should the philosopher follow?”
He answers, “That exactly which was followed
by the Great Architect of the Universe in the
creation of the world.”

One might suppose it would be easier, and perhaps
more profitable, to examine, observe, and
experiment, than to turn one’s eyes inwards with
the hope of discovering exactly “the road followed
by the Great Architect of the Universe in the
creation of the world.” But the alchemical method
found it easier to begin by introspection. The
alchemist spun his universe from his own ideas
of order, symmetry, and simplicity, as the spider
spins her web from her own substance.

A favourite saying of the alchemists was,
“What is above is as what is below.” In one
of its aspects this saying meant, “processes happen
within the earth like those which occur on
the earth; minerals and metals live, as animals
and plants live; all pass through corruption towards
perfection.” In another aspect the saying
meant “the human being is the world in
miniature; as is the microcosm, so is the
macrocosm; to know oneself is to know all the
world.”

Every man knows he ought to try to rise to better
things, and many men endeavour to do what they
know they ought to do; therefore, he who feels
sure that all nature is fashioned after the image
of man, projects his own ideas of progress, development,
virtue, matter and spirit, on to nature outside
himself; and, as a matter of course, this
kind of naturalist uses the same language when
he is speaking of the changes of material things
as he employs to express the changes of his mental
states, his hopes, fears, aspirations, and struggles.

The language of the alchemists was, therefore,
rich in such expressions as these; “the elements
are to be so conjoined that the nobler and fuller
life may be produced”; “our arcanum is gold
exalted to the highest degree of perfection to
which the combined action of nature and art
can develop it.”

Such commingling of ethical and physical
ideas, such application of moral conceptions to
material phenomena, was characteristic of the
alchemical method of regarding nature. The
necessary results were; great confusion of
thought, much mystification of ideas, and a
superabundance of views about natural events.

When the author of The Metamorphosis of Metals
was seeking for an argument in favour of his
view, that water is the source and primal element
of all things, he found what he sought in the
Biblical text: “In the beginning the spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters.”
Similarly, the author of The Sodic Hydrolith
clenches his argument in favour of the existence
of the Philosopher’s Stone, by the quotation:
“Therefore, thus saith the Lord; behold I lay
in Zion for a foundation a Stone, a tried Stone,
a precious corner Stone, a sure foundation. He
that has it shall not be confounded.” This
author works out in detail an analogy between
the functions and virtues of the Stone, and the
story of man’s fall and redemption, as set forth
in the Old and New Testaments. The same
author speaks of “Satan, that grim pseudo-alchemist.”

That the attribution, by the alchemists, of moral
virtues and vices to natural things was in keeping
with some deep-seated tendency of human nature,
is shown by the persistence of some of their
methods of stating the properties of substances:
we still speak of “perfect and imperfect gases,”
“noble and base metals,” “good and bad conductors
of electricity,” and “laws governing
natural phenomena.”

Convinced of the simplicity of nature, certain
that all natural events follow one course, sure
that this course was known to them and was
represented by the growth of plants and animals,
the alchemists set themselves the task, firstly, of
proving by observations and experiments that
their view of natural occurrences was correct;
and, secondly, of discovering and gaining
possession of the instrument whereby nature
effects her transmutations and perfects her
operations. The mastery of this instrument
would give them power to change any metal
into gold, the cure of all diseases, and the
happiness which must come from the practical
knowledge of the supreme secret of nature.

The central quest of alchemy was the quest of
an undefined and undefinable something wherein
was supposed to be contained all the powers and
potencies of life, and whatever makes life worth
living.

The names given to this mystical something
were as many as the properties which were
assigned to it. It was called the one thing, the
essence, the philosopher’s stone, the stone of wisdom,
the heavenly balm, the divine water, the virgin water,
the carbuncle of the sun, the old dragon, the lion, the
basilisk, the phœnix; and many other names were
given to it.

We may come near to expressing the alchemist’s
view of the essential character of the
object of their search by naming it the soul of all
things. “Alchemy,” a modern writer says, “is
the science of the soul of all things.”

The essence was supposed to have a material
form, an ethereal or middle nature, and an
immaterial or spiritual life.

No one might hope to make this essence from
any one substance, because, as one of the
alchemists says, “It is the attribute of God
alone to make one out of one; you must produce
one thing out of two by natural generation.”
The alchemists did not pretend to create gold,
but only to produce it from other things.

The author of A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby
says: “We do not, as is sometimes said, profess
to create gold and silver, but only to find an
agent which … is capable of entering into an
intimate and maturing union with the Mercury
of the base metals.” And again: “Our Art … only
arrogates to itself the power of developing,
through the removal of all defects and superfluities,
the golden nature which the baser metals
possess.” Bonus, in his tract on The New Pearl of
Great Price (16th century), says: “The Art of
Alchemy … does not create metals, or even
develop them out of the metallic first-substance;
it only takes up the unfinished handicraft of
Nature and completes it…. Nature has only
left a comparatively small thing for the artist to
do—the completion of that which she has already
begun.”

If the essence were ever attained, it would be
by following the course which nature follows
in producing the perfect plant from the imperfect
seed, by discovering and separating the seed of
metals, and bringing that seed under the conditions
which alone are suitable for its growth.
Metals must have seed, the alchemists said, for
it would be absurd to suppose they have none.
“What prerogative have vegetables above
metals,” exclaims one of them, “that God should
give seed to the one and withhold it from the
other? Are not metals as much in His sight as
trees?”

As metals, then, possess seed, it is evident
how this seed is to be made active; the seed of
a plant is quickened by descending into the
earth, therefore the seed of metals must be
destroyed before it becomes life-producing. “The
processes of our art must begin with dissolution
of gold; they must terminate in a restoration of
the essential quality of gold.” “Gold does not
easily give up its nature, and will fight for its
life; but our agent is strong enough to overcome
and kill it, and then it also has power to restore
it to life, and to change the lifeless remains into
a new and pure body.”

The application of the doctrine of the existence
of seed in metals led to the performance of many
experiments, and, hence, to the accumulation
of a considerable body of facts established
by experimental inquiries. The belief of the
alchemists that all natural events are connected
by a hidden thread, that everything has an
influence on other things, that “what is above is
as what is below,” constrained them to place
stress on the supposed connexion between the
planets and the metals, and to further their
metallic transformations by performing them at
times when certain planets were in conjunction.
The seven principal planets and the seven
principal metals were called by the same names:
Sol (gold), Luna (silver), Saturn (lead), Jupiter
(tin), Mars (iron), Venus (copper), and Mercury
(mercury). The author of The New Chemical
Light taught that one metal could be propagated
from another only in the order of superiority of
the planets. He placed the seven planets in
the following descending order: Saturn, Jupiter,
Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, Luna. “The virtues
of the planets descend,” he said, “but do not
ascend”; it is easy to change Mars (iron) into
Venus (copper), for instance, but Venus cannot
be transformed into Mars.

Although the alchemists regarded everything
as influencing, and influenced by, other things,
they were persuaded that the greatest effects are
produced on a substance by substances of like
nature with itself. Hence, most of them taught
that the seed of metals will be obtained by operations
with metals, not by the action on metals of
things of animal or vegetable origin. Each class
of substances, they said, has a life, or spirit (an
essential character, we might say) of its own.
“The life of sulphur,” Paracelsus said, “is a
combustible, ill-smelling, fatness…. The life
of gems and corals is mere colour…. The life
of water is its flowing…. The life of fire is
air.” Grant an attraction of like to like, and the
reason becomes apparent for such directions as
these: “Nothing heterogeneous must be introduced
into our magistery”; “Everything should
be made to act on that which is like it, and then
Nature will perform her duty.”

Although each class of substances was said by the
alchemists to have its own particular character,
or life, nevertheless they taught that there is a
deep-seated likeness between all things, inasmuch
as the power of the essence, or the one thing, is so
great that under its influence different things
are produced from the same origin, and different
things are caused to pass into and become the
same thing. In The New Chemical Light it is
said: “While the seed of all things is one, it is
made to generate a great variety of things.”

It is not easy now—it could not have been
easy at any time—to give clear and exact meanings
to the doctrines of the alchemists, or the
directions they gave for performing the operations
necessary for the production of the object
of their search. And the difficulty is much increased
when we are told that “The Sage jealously
conceals [his knowledge] from the sinner and the
scornful, lest the mysteries of heaven should be laid
bare to the vulgar gaze.” We almost despair
when an alchemical writer assures us that the
Sages “Set pen to paper for the express purpose
of concealing their meaning. The sense of a
whole passage is often hopelessly obscured by
the addition or omission of one little word, for
instance the addition of the word not in the
wrong place.” Another writer says: “The Sages
are in the habit of using words which may convey
either a true or a false impression; the former
to their own disciples and children, the latter to
the ignorant, the foolish, and the unworthy.”
Sometimes, after descriptions of processes couched
in strange and mystical language, the writer will
add, “If you cannot perceive what you ought to
understand herein, you should not devote yourself
to the study of philosophy.” Philalethes,
in his Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby, seems to
feel some pity for his readers; after describing
what he calls “the generic homogeneous water of
gold,” he says: “If you wish for a more particular
description of our water, I am impelled
by motives of charity to tell you that it is living,
flexible, clear, nitid, white as snow, hot, humid,
airy, vaporous, and digestive.”

Alchemy began by asserting that nature must
be simple; it assumed that a knowledge of the
plan and method of natural occurrences is to be
obtained by thinking; and it used analogy as the
guide in applying this knowledge of nature’s
design to particular events, especially the analogy,
assumed by alchemy to exist, between material
phenomena and human emotions.

CHAPTER III.

THE ALCHEMICAL CONCEPTION OF THE UNITY
AND SIMPLICITY OF NATURE.

In the preceding chapter I have referred to the
frequent use made by the alchemists of their
supposition that nature follows the same plan,
or at any rate a very similar plan, in all her
processes. If this supposition is accepted, the
primary business of an investigator of nature is
to trace likenesses and analogies between what
seem on the surface to be dissimilar and unconnected
events. As this idea, and this practice,
were the foundations whereon the superstructure
of alchemy was raised, I think it is important
to amplify them more fully than I have done already.

Mention is made in many alchemical writings
of a mythical personage named Hermes Trismegistus,
who is said to have lived a little later than
the time of Moses. Representations of Hermes
Trismegistus are found on ancient Egyptian
monuments. We are told that Alexander
the Great found his tomb near Hebron; and that the
tomb contained a slab of emerald whereon thirteen
sentences were written. The eighth sentence is
rendered in many alchemical books as follows:

“Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the
earth to heaven, and then again descend to the
earth, and unite together the powers of things
superior and things inferior. Thus you will
obtain the glory of the whole world, and obscurity
will fly away from you.”

This sentence evidently teaches the unity of
things in heaven and things on earth, and asserts
the possibility of gaining, not merely a theoretical,
but also a practical, knowledge of the essential
characters of all things. Moreover, the sentence
implies that this fruitful knowledge is to be
obtained by examining nature, using as guide
the fundamental similarity supposed to exist
between things above and things beneath.

The alchemical writers constantly harp on this
theme: follow nature; provided you never lose
the clue, which is simplicity and similarity.

The author of The Only Way (1677) beseeches
his readers “to enlist under the standard of that
method which proceeds in strict obedience to the
teaching of nature … in short, the method
which nature herself pursues in the bowels of the
earth.”

The alchemists tell us not to expect much help
from books and written directions. When one
of them has said all he can say, he adds—”The
question is whether even this book will convey
any information to one before whom the writings
of the Sages and the open book of Nature are
exhibited in vain.” Another tells his readers the
only thing for them is “to beseech God to give
you the real philosophical temper, and to open
your eyes to the facts of nature; thus alone
will you reach the coveted goal.”

“Follow nature” is sound advice. But, nature
was to be followed with eyes closed save to one
vision, and the vision was to be seen before
the following began.

The alchemists’ general conception of nature
led them to assign to every substance a condition
or state natural to it, and wherein alone it could
be said to be as it was designed to be. Each
substance, they taught, could be caused to leave
its natural state only by violent, or non-natural,
means, and any substance which had been driven
from its natural condition by violence was ready,
and even eager, to return to the condition consonant
with its nature.

Thus Norton, in his Ordinal of Alchemy, says:
“Metals are generated in the earth, for above
ground they are subject to rust; hence above
ground is the place of corruption of metals, and
of their gradual destruction. The cause which
we assign to this fact is that above ground they
are not in their proper element, and an unnatural
position is destructive to natural objects, as we
see, for instance, that fishes die when they are
taken out of the water; and as it is natural for
men, beasts, and birds to live in the air, so stones
and metals are naturally generated under the
earth.”

In his New Pearl of Great Price (16th century),
Bonus says:—”The object of Nature in all things
is to introduce into each substance the form
which properly belongs to it; and this is also
the design of our Art.”

This view assumed the knowledge of the natural
conditions of the substances wherewith experiments
were performed. It supposed that man
could act as a guide, to bring back to its
natural condition a substance which had been removed
from that condition, either by violent processes
of nature, or by man’s device. The alchemist
regarded himself as an arbiter in questions concerning
the natural condition of each substance
he dealt with. He thought he could say, “this
substance ought to be thus, or thus,” “that
substance is constrained, thwarted, hindered from
becoming what nature meant it to be.”

In Ben Jonson’s play called The Alchemist,
Subtle (who is the alchemist of the play) says,
” … metals would be gold if they had time.”

The alchemist not only attributed ethical
qualities to material things, he also became the
guardian and guide of the moral practices of
these things. He thought himself able to recall
the erring metal to the path of metalline virtue,
to lead the extravagant mineral back to the moral
home-life from which it had been seduced, to
show the doubting and vacillating salt what it
was ignorantly seeking, and to help it to find the
unrealised object of its search. The alchemist
acted as a sort of conscience to the metals,
minerals, salts, and other substances he submitted
to the processes of his laboratory. He treated
them as a wise physician might treat an ignorant
and somewhat refractory patient. “I know what
you want better than you do,” he seems often to
be saying to the metals he is calcining, separating,
joining and subliming.

But the ignorant alchemist was not always
thanked for his treatment. Sometimes the
patient rebelled. For instance, Michael Sendivogius,
in his tract, The New Chemical Light drawn
from the Fountain of Nature and of Manual Experience
(17th century), recounts a dialogue between
Mercury, the Alchemist, and Nature.

“On a certain bright morning a number of
Alchemists met together in a meadow, and consulted
as to the best way of preparing the
Philosopher’s Stone…. Most of them agreed
that Mercury was the first substance. Others
said, no, it was sulphur, or something else….
Just as the dispute began to run high, there
arose a violent wind, which dispersed the Alchemists
into all the different countries of the
world; and as they had arrived at no conclusion,
each one went on seeking the Philosopher’s Stone
in his own old way, this one expecting to find
it in one substance, and that in another, so that
the search has continued without intermission
even unto this day. One of them, however, had
at least got the idea into his head that Mercury
was the substance of the Stone, and determined
to concentrate all his efforts on the chemical
preparation of Mercury…. He took common
Mercury and began to work with it. He placed
it in a glass vessel over the fire, when it, of
course, evaporated. So in his ignorance he struck
his wife, and said: ‘No one but you has entered
my laboratory; you must have taken my Mercury
out of the vessel.’ The woman, with tears, protested
her innocence. The Alchemist put some
more Mercury into the vessel…. The Mercury
rose to the top of the vessel in vaporous steam.
Then the Alchemist was full of joy, because he
remembered that the first substance of the Stone
is described by the Sages as volatile; and he
thought that now at last he must be on the right
track. He now began to subject the Mercury to
all sorts of chemical processes, to sublime it, and
to calcine it with all manner of things, with salts,
sulphur, metals, minerals, blood, hair, aqua fortis,
herbs, urine, and vinegar…. Everything he
could think of was tried; but without producing
the desired effect.” The Alchemist then despaired;
after a dream, wherein an old man came and
talked with him about the “Mercury of the
Sages,” the Alchemist thought he would charm
the Mercury, and so he used a form of incantation.
The Mercury suddenly began to speak, and
asked the Alchemist why he had troubled him so
much, and so on. The Alchemist replied, and
questioned the Mercury. The Mercury makes
fun of the philosopher. Then the Alchemist
again torments the Mercury by heating him with
all manner of horrible things. At last Mercury
calls in the aid of Nature, who soundly rates the
philosopher, tells him he is grossly ignorant, and
ends by saying: “The best thing you can do is to
give yourself up to the king’s officers, who will
quickly put an end to you and your philosophy.”

As long as men were fully persuaded that they
knew the plan whereon the world was framed,
that it was possible for them to follow exactly
“the road which was followed by the Great
Architect of the Universe in the creation of the
world,” a real knowledge of natural events was
impossible; for every attempt to penetrate
nature’s secrets presupposed a knowledge of the
essential characteristics of that which was to be
investigated. But genuine knowledge begins
when the investigator admits that he must learn
of nature, not nature of him. It might be
truly said of one who held the alchemical conception
of nature that “his foible was omniscience”;
and omniscience negatives the attainment of
knowledge.

The alchemical notion of a natural state as
proper to each substance was vigorously combated
by the Honourable Robert Boyle (born 1626,
died 1691), a man of singularly clear and penetrative
intellect. In A Paradox of the Natural
and Supernatural States of Bodies, Especially of the
Air, Boyle says:—”I know that not only in
living, but even in inanimate, bodies, of which
alone I here discourse, men have universally
admitted the famous distinction between the
natural and preternatural, or violent state of
bodies, and do daily, without the least scruple,
found upon it hypotheses and ratiocinations, as
if it were most certain that what they call nature
had purposely formed bodies in such a determinate
state, and were always watchful that they
should not by any external violence be put out
of it. But notwithstanding so general a consent
of men in this point, I confess, I cannot yet be
satisfied about it in the sense wherein it is wont
to be taken. It is not, that I believe, that there
is no sense in which, or in the account upon
which, a body may he said to be in its natural
state; but that I think the common distinction
of a natural and violent state of bodies has not
been clearly explained and considerately settled,
and both is not well grounded, and is oftentimes
ill applied. For when I consider that whatever
state a body be put into, or kept in, it
obtains or retains that state, assenting to the
catholic laws of nature, I cannot think it fit to
deny that in this sense the body proposed is in a
natural state; but then, upon the same ground,
it will he hard to deny but that those bodies
which are said to be in a violent state may also
be in a natural one, since the violence they are
presumed to suffer from outward agents is likewise
exercised no otherwise than according to
the established laws of universal nature.”

There must be something very fascinating and
comforting in the alchemical view of nature, as
a harmony constructed on one simple plan,
which can be grasped as a whole, and also in its
details, by the introspective processes of the
human intellect; for that conception prevails
to-day among those who have not investigated
natural occurrences for themselves. The alchemical
view of nature still forms the foundation
of systems of ethics, of philosophy, of art. It
appeals to the innate desire of man to make
himself the measure of all things. It is so easy,
so authoritative, apparently so satisfactory. No
amount of thinking and reasoning will ever
demonstrate its falsity. It can be conquered
only by a patient, unbiassed, searching examination
of some limited portion of natural events.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ALCHEMICAL ELEMENTS AND PRINCIPLES.

The alchemists were sure that the intention of
nature regarding metals was that they should
become gold, for gold was considered to be the
most perfect metal, and nature, they said,
evidently strains after perfection. The alchemist
found that metals were worn away, eaten
through, broken, and finally caused to disappear,
by many acid and acrid liquids which he prepared
from mineral substances. But gold resisted the
attacks of these liquids; it was not changed by
heat, nor was it affected by sulphur, a substance
which changed limpid, running mercury into an
inert, black solid. Hence, gold was more perfect
in the alchemical scale than any other metal.

Since gold was considered to be the most
perfect metal, it was self-evident to the alchemical
mind that nature must form gold slowly in the
earth, must transmute gradually the inferior
metals into gold.

“The only thing that distinguishes one metal
from another,” writes an alchemist who went
under the name of Philalethes, “is its degree of
maturity, which is, of course, greatest in the
most precious metals; the difference between
gold and lead is not one of substance, but of
digestion; in the baser metal the coction has not
been such as to purge out its metallic impurities.
If by any means this superfluous impure matter
could be organically removed from the baser
metals, they would become gold and silver. So
miners tell us that lead has in many cases
developed into silver in the bowels of the earth,
and we contend that the same effect is produced
in a much shorter time by means of our Art.”

Stories were told about the finding of gold in
deserted mines which had been worked out long
before; these stories were supposed to prove
that gold was bred in the earth. The facts that
pieces of silver were found in tin and lead mines,
and gold was found in silver mines, were adduced
as proofs that, as the author of The New Pearl of
Great Price says, “Nature is continually at work
changing other metals into gold, because, though
in a certain sense they are complete in themselves,
they have not yet reached the highest
perfection of which they are capable, and to
which nature has destined them.” What nature
did in the earth man could accomplish in the
workshop. For is not man the crown of the
world, the masterpiece of nature, the flower of
the universe; was he not given dominion over
all things when the world was created?

In asserting that the baser metals could be
transmuted into gold, and in attempting to effect
this transmutation, the alchemist was not acting
on a vague; haphazard surmise; he was pursuing
a policy dictated by his conception of the order
of nature; he was following the method which he
conceived to be that used by nature herself. The
transmutation of metals was part and parcel of a
system of natural philosophy. If this transmutation
were impossible, the alchemical scheme of
things would be destroyed, the believer in the
transmutation would be left without a sense of
order in the material universe. And, moreover,
the alchemist’s conception of an orderly material
universe was so intimately connected with his
ideas of morality and religion, that to disprove
the possibility of the great transmutation would
be to remove not only the basis of his system of
material things, but the foundations of his system
of ethics also. To take away his belief in the
possibility of changing other metals into gold
would be to convert the alchemist into an atheist.

How, then, was the transmutation to be
accomplished? Evidently by the method whereby
nature brings to perfection other living things;
for the alchemist’s belief in the simplicity and
unity of nature compelled him to regard metals
as living things.

Plants are improved by appropriate culture,
by digging and enriching the soil, by judicious
selection of seed; animals are improved by
careful breeding. By similar processes metals
will be encouraged and helped towards perfection.
The perfect state of gold will not be
reached at a bound; it will be gained gradually.
Many partial purifications will be needed. As
Subtle says in The Alchemist—

At this stage the alchemical argument becomes
very ultra-physical. It may, perhaps, be rendered
somewhat as follows:—

Man is the most perfect of animals; in man
there is a union of three parts, these are body,
soul, and spirit. Metals also may be said to have
a body, a soul, and a spirit; there is a specific
bodily, or material, form belonging to each metal;
there is a metalline soul characteristic of this or
that class of metals; there is a spirit, or inner
immaterial potency, which is the very essence of
all metals.

The soul and spirit of man are clogged by his
body. If the spiritual nature is to become the
dominating partner, the body must be mortified:
the alchemists, of course, used this kind of
imagery, and it was very real to them. In like
manner the spirit of metals will be laid bare and
enabled to exercise its transforming influences,
only when the material form of the individual
metal has been destroyed. The first thing to do,
then, is to strip off and cast aside those properties
of metals which appeal to the senses.

“It is necessary to deprive matter of its
qualities in order to draw out its soul,” said
Stephanus of Alexandria in the 7th century;
and in the 17th century Paracelsus said, “Nothing
of true value is located in the body of a substance,
but in the virtue … the less there is of
body the more in proportion is the virtue.”

But the possession of the soul of metals is not
the final stage: mastery of the soul may mean
the power of transmuting a metal into another
like itself; it will not suffice for the great
transmutation, for in that process a metal becomes
gold, the one and only perfect metal. Hence the
soul also must be removed, in order that the
spirit, the essence, the kernel, may be obtained.

And as it is with metals, so, the alchemists
argued, it is with all things. There are a few
Principles which may be thought of as conditioning
the specific bodily and material forms of
things; beneath these, there are certain Elements
which are common to many things whose
principles are not the same; and, hidden by the
wrappings of elements and principles, there
is the one Essence, the spirit, the mystic uniting
bond, the final goal of the philosopher.

I propose in this chapter to try to analyse the
alchemical conceptions of Elements and Principles,
and in the next chapter to attempt some kind of
description of the Essence.

In his Tract Concerning the Great Stone of the
Ancient Sages, Basil Valentine speaks of the
“three Principles,” salt, sulphur, and mercury,
the source of which is the Elements.

“There are four Elements, and each has at its
centre another element which makes it what it
is. These are the four pillars of the earth.”

Of the element Earth, he says:—”In this
element the other three, especially fire, are latent…. It
is gross and porous, specifically heavy,
but naturally light…. It receives all that the
other three project into it, conscientiously conceals
what it should hide, and brings to light
that which it should manifest…. Outwardly it
is visible and fixed, inwardly it is invisible and
volatile.”

Of the element Water, Basil Valentine says:—”Outwardly
it is volatile, inwardly it is fixed,
cold, and humid…. It is the solvent of the
world, and exists in three degrees of excellence:
the pure, the purer, and the purest. Of its
purest substance the heavens were created; of
that which is less pure the atmospheric air was
formed; that which is simply pure remains in its
proper sphere where … it is guardian of all
subtle substances here below.”

Concerning the element Air, he writes:—”The
most noble Element of Air … is volatile, but
may be fixed, and when fixed renders all bodies
penetrable…. It is nobler than Earth or Water….
It nourishes, impregnates, conserves the other
elements.”

Finally, of the element Fire:—”Fire is the
purest and noblest of all Elements, full of adhesive
unctuous corrosiveness, penetrant, digestive,
inwardly fixed, hot and dry, outwardly visible,
and tempered by the earth…. This Element is
the most passive of all, and resembles a chariot;
when it is drawn, it moves; when it is not drawn,
it stands still.”

Basil Valentine then tells his readers that
Adam was compounded of the four pure Elements,
but after his expulsion from Paradise he became
subject to the various impurities of the animal
creation. “The pure Elements of his creation
were gradually mingled and infected with the
corruptible elements of the outer world, and thus
his body became more and more gross, and liable,
through its grossness, to natural decay and death.”
The process of degeneration was slow at first, but
“as time went on, the seed out of which men
were generated became more and more infected
with perishable elements. The continued use of
corruptible food rendered their bodies more and
more gross; and human life was soon reduced to
a very brief span.”

Basil Valentine then deals with the formation
of the three Principles of things, by the mutual
action of the four Elements. Fire acting on Air
produced Sulphur; Air acting on Water produced
Mercury; Water acting on Earth produced Salt.
Earth having nothing to act on produced nothing,
but became the nurse of the three Principles.
“The three Principles,” he says, “are necessary
because they are the immediate substance of
metals. The remoter substance of metals is the
four elements, but no one can produce anything
out of them but God; and even God makes
nothing of them but these three Principles.”

To endeavour to obtain the four pure Elements
is a hopeless task. But the Sage has the three
Principles at hand. “The artist should determine
which of the three Principles he is seeking,
and should assist it so that it may overcome its
contrary.” “The art consists in an even mingling
of the virtues of the Elements; in the natural
equilibrium of the hot, the dry, the cold, and the
moist.”

The account of the Elements given by Philalethes
differs from that of Basil Valentine.

Philalethes enumerates three Elements only:
Air, Water, and Earth. Things are not formed
by the mixture of these Elements, for
“dissimilar things can never really unite.” By
analysing the properties of the three Elements,
Philalethes reduced them finally to one, namely,
Water. “Water,” he says, “is the first principle
of all things.” “Earth is the fundamental
Element in which all bodies grow and are preserved.
Air is the medium into which they grow,
and by means of which the celestial virtues are
communicated to them.”

According to Philalethes, Mercury is the most
important of the three Principles. Although
gold is formed by the aid of Mercury, it is only when
Mercury has been matured, developed, and perfected,
that it is able to transmute inferior metals
into gold. The essential thing to do is, therefore,
to find an agent which will bring about the maturing
and perfecting of Mercury. This agent,
Philalethes calls “Our divine Arcanum.”

Although it appears to me impossible to translate
the sayings of the alchemists concerning
Elements and Principles into expressions which
shall have definite and exact meanings for us
to-day, still we may, perhaps, get an inkling of
the meaning of such sentences as those I have
quoted from Basil Valentine and Philalethes.

Take the terms Fire and Water. In former
times all liquid substances were supposed to be
liquid because they possessed something
in common; this hypothetical something was
called the Element, Water. Similarly, the view
prevailed until comparatively recent times, that
burning substances burn because of the presence
in them of a hypothetical imponderable
fluid, called “Caloric“; the alchemists preferred
to call this indefinable something an Element,
and to name it Fire.

We are accustomed to-day to use the words
fire and water with different meanings, according
to the ideas we wish to express. When we say
“do not touch the fire,” or “put your hand
into the water,” we are regarding fire and water
as material things; when we say “the house is
on fire,” or speak of “a diamond of the first
water,” we are thinking of the condition or state
of a burning body, or of a substance as transparent
as water. When we say “put out the
fire,” or “his heart became as water,” we are
referring to the act of burning, or are using an
image which likens the thing spoken of to a
substance in the act of liquefying.

As we do to-day, so the alchemists did before
us; they used the words fire and water to express
different ideas.

Such terms as hardness, softness, coldness,
toughness, and the like, are employed for the
purpose of bringing together into one point of
view different things which are alike in, at
least, one respect. Hard things may differ in
size, weight, shape, colour, texture, &c. A
soft thing may weigh the same as a hard
thing; both may have the same colour or the
same size, or be at the same temperature, and
so on. By classing together various things as
hard or soft, or smooth or rough, we eliminate
(for the time) all the properties wherein the
things differ, and regard them only as having
one property in common. The words hardness,
softness, &c., are useful class-marks.

Similarly the alchemical Elements and Principles
were useful class-marks.

We must not suppose that when the alchemists
spoke of certain things as formed from, or by
the union of, the same Elements or the same
Principles, they meant that these things
contained a common substance. Their Elements and Principles
were not thought of as substances, at least
not in the modern meaning of the expression, a
substance; they were qualities only.

If we think of the alchemical elements earth,
air, fire, and water, as general expressions of
what seemed to the alchemists the most important properties
of all substances, we may be able to attach
some kind of meaning to the sayings of Basil
Valentine, which I have quoted. For instance,
when that alchemist tells us, “Fire is the most
passive of all elements, and resembles a chariot;
when it is drawn, it moves; when it is not drawn,
it stands still”—we may suppose he meant to
express the fact that a vast number of substances
can be burnt, and that combustion does not begin
of itself, but requires an external agency to start it.

Unfortunately, most of the terms which the
alchemists used to designate their Elements and
Principles are terms which are now employed to
designate specific substances. The word fire
is still employed rather as a quality of many things
under special conditions, than as a specific substance;
but earth, water, air, salt, sulphur, and
mercury, are to-day the names applied to certain
groups of properties, each of which is different
from all other groups of properties, and is, therefore,
called, in ordinary speech, a definite kind of matter.

As knowledge became more accurate and more
concentrated, the words sulphur, salt, mercury,
&c., began to be applied to distinct substances,
and as these terms were still employed in their
alchemical sense as compendious expressions for
certain qualities common to great classes of substances,
much confusion arose. Kunckel, the
discoverer of phosphorus, who lived between
1630 and 1702, complained of the alchemists’
habit of giving different names to the same
substance, and the same name to different substances.
“The sulphur of one,” he says, “is
not the sulphur of another, to the great injury
of science. To that one replies that everyone
is perfectly free to baptise his infant as he
pleases. Granted. You may if you like call
an ass an ox, but you will never make anyone
believe that your ox is an ass.” Boyle is very
severe on the vague and loose use of words
practised by so many writers of his time. In
The Sceptical Chymist (published 1678-9) he
says: “If judicious men, skilled in chymical
affairs, shall once agree to write clearly and
plainly of them, and thereby keep men from
being stunned, as it were, or imposed upon
by dark and empty words; it is to be hoped
that these [other] men finding, that they can
no longer write impertinently and absurdly,
without being laughed at for doing so, will be
reduced either to write nothing, or books that
may teach us something, and not rob men, as
formerly, of invaluable time; and so ceasing
to trouble the world with riddles or impertinences,
we shall either by their books receive an
advantage, or by their silence escape an
inconvenience.”

Most of the alchemists taught that the elements
produced what they called seed, by their
mutual reactions, and the principles matured
this seed and brought it to perfection. They
supposed that each class, or kind, of things had
its own seed, and that to obtain the seed was to
have the power of producing the things which
sprung from that seed.

Some of them, however, asserted that all things
come from a common seed, and that the nature
of the products of this seed is conditioned by the
circumstances under which it is caused to develop.

Thus Michael Sendivogius writes as follows
in The New Chemical Light, drawn from the
fountain of Nature and of Manual Experience (17th
century):—

CHAPTER V.

THE ALCHEMICAL ESSENCE.

In the last chapter I tried to describe the
alchemical view of the interdependence of
different substances. Taking for granted the
tripartite nature of man, the co-existence in him
of body, soul, and spirit (no one of which was
defined), the alchemists concluded that all things
are formed as man is formed; that in everything
there is a specific bodily form, some portion of
soul, and a dash of spirit. I considered the term
soul to be the alchemical name for the properties
common to a class of substances, and the term
spirit to mean the property which was thought
by the alchemists to be common to all things.

The alchemists considered it possible to arrange
all substances in four general classes, the marks
whereof were expressed by the terms hot, cold,
moist, and dry; they thought of these properties
as typified by what they called the four Elements—fire,
air, water, and earth. Everything, they
taught, was produced from the four Elements,
not immediately, but through the mediation of
the three Principles—mercury, sulphur, and salt.
These Principles were regarded as the tools put
into the hands of him who desired to effect the
transmutation of one substance into another.
The Principles were not thought of as definite
substances, nor as properties of this or that
specified substance; they were considered to be
the characteristic properties of large classes of
substances.

The chemist of to-day places many compounds
in the same class because all are acids, because
all react similarly under similar conditions. It
used to be said that every acid possesses more or
less of the principle of acidity. Lavoisier changed
the language whereby certain facts concerning acids
were expressed. He thought that experiments
proved all acids to be compounds of the
element oxygen; and for many years after
Lavoisier, the alchemical expression the principle
of acidity was superseded by the word oxygen.
Although Lavoisier recognised that not every
compound of oxygen is an acid, he taught that
every acid is a compound of oxygen. We know
now that many acids are not compounds of
oxygen, but we have not yet sufficient knowledge
to frame a complete definition of the term acid.
Nevertheless it is convenient, indeed it is
necessary, to place together many compounds
which react similarly under certain defined conditions,
and to give a common name to them all.
The alchemists also classified substances, but
their classification was necessarily more vague
than ours; and they necessarily expressed their
reasons for putting different substances in the
same class in a language which arose out of the
general conceptions of natural phenomena which
prevailed in their time.

The primary classification of substances made
by the alchemists was expressed by saying; these
substances are rich in the principle sulphur, those
contain much of the principle mercury, and this
class is marked by the preponderance of the
principle salt. The secondary classification of
the alchemists was expressed by saying; this
class is characterised by dryness, that by moisture,
another by coldness, and a fourth by
hotness; the dry substances contain much of
the element Earth, the moist substances are rich
in the element Water, in the cold substances the
element Air preponderates, and the hot substances
contain more of the element Fire than of
the other elements.

The alchemists went a step further in their
classification of things. They asserted that there
is One Thing present in all things; that everything
is a vehicle for the more or less perfect
exhibition of the properties of the One Thing;
that there is a Primal Element common to all
substances. The final aim of alchemy was to
obtain the One Thing, the Primal Element, the
Soul of all Things, so purified, not only from all
specific substances, but also from all admixture
of the four Elements and the three Principles,
as to make possible the accomplishment of any
transmutation by the use of it.

If a person ignorant of its powers were to
obtain the Essence, he might work vast havoc and
cause enormous confusion; it was necessary,
therefore, to know the conditions under which
the potencies of the Essence became active.
Hence there was need of prolonged study of the
mutual actions of the most seemingly diverse
substances, and of minute and patient examination
of the conditions under which nature performs
her marvellous transmutations. The quest of the
One Thing was fraught with peril, and was to be
attempted only by those who had served a long
and laborious apprenticeship.

In The Chemical Treatise of Thomas Norton, the
Englishman, called Believe-me, or the Ordinal of
Alchemy (15th century), the adept is warned
not to disclose his secrets to ordinary people.

“You should carefully test and examine the life,
character, and mental aptitudes of any person
who would be initiated in this Art, and then you
should bind him, by a sacred oath, not to let our
Magistery be commonly or vulgarly known.
Only when he begins to grow old and feeble, he
may reveal it to one person, but not to more, and
that one man must be virtuous…. If any
wicked man should learn to practise the Art, the
event would be fraught with great danger to
Christendom. For such a man would overstep
all bounds of moderation, and would remove
from their hereditary thrones those legitimate
princes who rule over the peoples of Christendom.”

The results of the experimental examination of
the compositions and properties of substances,
made since the time of the alchemists, have led
to the modern conception of the chemical element,
and the isolation of about seventy or eighty
different elements. No substance now called an
element has been produced in the laboratory by
uniting two, or more, distinct substances, nor has
any been separated into two, or more, unlike
portions. The only decided change which a
chemical element has been caused to undergo
is the combination of it with some other element
or elements, or with a compound or compounds.

But it is possible that all the chemical elements
may be combinations of different quantities of one
primal element. Certain facts make this supposition
tenable; and some chemists expect that
the supposition will be proved to be correct. If
the hypothetical primal element should be isolated,
we should have fulfilled the aim of alchemy, and
gained the One Thing; but the fulfilment would
not be that whereof the alchemists dreamed.

Inasmuch as the alchemical Essence was thought
of as the Universal Spirit to whose presence is
due whatever degree of perfection any specific
substance exhibits, it followed that the more
perfect a substance the greater is the quantity of
the Essence in it. But even in the most perfect
substance found in nature—which substance, the
alchemists said, is gold—the Essence is hidden
by wrappings of specific properties which prevent
the ordinary man from recognising it. Remove
these wrappings from some special substance, and
you have the perfect form of that thing; you
have some portion of the Universal Spirit joined
to the one general property of the class of things
whereof the particular substance is a member.
Then remove the class-property, often spoken of
by the alchemists as the life, of the substance, and
you have the Essence itself.

The alchemists thought that to every thing, or at
any rate to every class of things, there corresponds
a more perfect form than that which we see and
handle; they spoke of gold, and the gold of the
Sages; mercury, and the mercury of the Philosophers;
sulphur, and the heavenly sulphur of him whose eyes
are opened.

To remove the outer wrappings of ordinary
properties which present themselves to the
untrained senses, was regarded by the alchemists to
be a difficult task; to tear away the soul
(the class-property) of a substance, and yet retain the
Essence which made that substance its dwelling
place, was possible only after vast labour, and by
the use of the proper agent
working under the
proper conditions. An exceedingly powerful,
delicate, and refined agent
was needed; and the
mastery of the agent was to be acquired by bitter
experience, and, probably, after many disappointments.

“Gold,” an alchemist tells us, “does not easily
give up its nature, and will fight for its life;
but our agent is strong enough to overcome and kill
it, and then it also has the power to restore it to
life, and to change the lifeless remains into a new
and pure body.”

Thomas Norton, the author of The Ordinal of
Alchemy, writing in the 15th century, says the
worker in transmutations is often tempted to
be in a hurry, or to despair, and he is often deceived.
His servants will be either stupid and
faithful, or quick-witted and false. He may be robbed of
everything when his work is almost
finished. The only remedies are infinite patience, a sense
of virtue, and sound reason. “In the pursuit of
our Art,” he says, “you should take care, from
time to time, to unbend your mind
from its sterner employments with some convenient
recreation.”

The choice of workmen to aid in the mechanical
parts of the quest was a great trouble to the
alchemists. On this subject Norton says—”If
you would be free from all fear over the gross
work, follow my counsel, and never engage
married men; for they soon give in and pretend
they are tired out…. Hire your workmen for
certain stipulated wages, and not for longer
periods than twenty-four hours at a time. Give
them higher wages than they would receive
elsewhere, and be prompt and ready in your payments.”

Many accounts are given by alchemical writers
of the agent, and many names are bestowed on
it. The author of A Brief Guide to the Celestial
Ruby speaks thus of the agent—”It is our
doorkeeper, our balm, our honey, oil, urine, maydew,
mother, egg, secret furnace, oven,
true fire, venomous dragon, Theriac, ardent wine, Green
Lion, Bird of Hermes, Goose of
Hermogenes, two-edged sword in the hand of the Cherub that
guards the Tree of Life…. It is
our true secret vessel, and the Garden of the Sages in which our
sun rises and sets. It is our
Royal Mineral, our triumphant vegetable Saturnia, and the magic
rod of Hermes, by means of
which he assumes any shape he likes.”

Sometimes we are told that the agent is mercury,
sometimes that it is gold, but not common
mercury or common gold. “Supplement your
common mercury with the inward fire which it
needs, and you will soon get rid of all superfluous
dross.” “The agent is gold, as highly
matured as natural and artificial digestion can make it,
and a thousand times more perfect
than the common metal of that name. Gold, thus exalted,
radically penetrates, tinges, and fixes
metals.”

The alchemists generally likened the work to
be performed by their agent to the killing of a
living thing. They constantly use the allegory
of death, followed by resurrection, in describing
the steps whereby the Essence was to be obtained,
and the processes whereby the baser metals were
to be partially purified. They speak of the mortification
of metals, the dissolution and putrefaction
of substances, as preliminaries to the
appearance of the true life of the things whose
outward properties have been destroyed. For
instance, Paracelsus says: “Destruction perfects
that which is good; for the good cannot appear
on account of that which conceals it.” The same
alchemist speaks of rusting as the mortification
of metals; he says: “The mortification of metals
is the removal of their bodily structure…. The
mortification of woods is their being turned into
charcoal or ashes.”

Paracelsus distinguishes natural from artificial mortification, “Whatever nature consumes,” he
says, “man cannot restore. But whatever man
destroys man can restore, and break again when
restored.” Things which had been mortified by
man’s device were considered by Paracelsus not
to be really dead. He gives this extraordinary
illustration of his meaning: “You see this is the
case with lions, which are all born dead, and
are first vitalised by the horrible noise of their
parents, just as a sleeping person is awakened
by a shout.”

The mortification of metals is represented in
alchemical books by various images and allegories.
Fig. I. is reduced from a cut in a 16th century
work, The Book of Lambspring, a noble ancient
Philosopher, concerning the Philosophical Stone.

Here the father devours the son;
The soul and spirit flow forth from the body.

FIG. I.

The image used to set forth the mortification of
metals is a king swallowing his son. Figs. II.
and III. are reduced from Basil Valentine’s Twelve
Keys. Both of these figures represent the process
of mortification by images connected with
death and burial.

FIG. II.

In his explanation (?) of these figures, Basil
Valentine says:—

FIG. III.

The action of the mineral agent in perfecting
substances is often likened by the alchemists to
the conjoining of the male and the female,
followed by the production of offspring. They
insist on the need of a union of two things, in
order to produce something more perfect than
either. The agent, they say, must work upon
something; alone it is nothing.

The methods whereby the agent is itself
perfected, and the processes wherein the agent
effects the perfecting of the less perfect things,
were divided into stages by the alchemists. They
generally spoke of these stages as Gates, and
enumerated ten or sometimes twelve of them.
As examples of the alchemical description of
these gates, I give some extracts from A Brief
Guide to the Celestial Ruby.

The first gate is Calcination, which is “the
drying up of the humours”; by this process the
substance “is concocted into a black powder
which is yet unctuous, and retains its radical
humour.” When gold passes through this gate,
“We observe in it two natures, the fixed and
the volatile, which we liken to two serpents.” The
fixed nature is likened to a serpent without
wings; the volatile, to a serpent with wings:
calcination unites these two into one. The
second gate, Dissolution, is likened to death and
burial; but the true Essence will appear glorious
and beautiful when this gate is passed. The
worker is told not to be discouraged by this
apparent death. The mercury of the sages is spoken
of by this author as the queen, and gold as the
king. The king dies for love of the queen, but
he is revived by his spouse, who is made fruitful
by him and brings forth “a most royal son.”

Figs. IV. and V. are reduced from The Book of
Lambspring; they express the need of the conjunction
of two to produce one.

The spirit and soul must be united in their body.
FIG. IV.

After dissolution came Conjunction, wherein the
separated elements were combined. Then followed
Putrefaction, necessary for the germination
of the seed which had been produced by calcination,
dissolution, and conjunction. Putrefaction
was followed by Congelation and Citation. The
passage through the next gate, called Sublimation,
caused the body to become spiritual,
and the spiritual to be made corporal. Fermentation
followed, whereby the substance became soft
and flowed like wax. Finally, by Exaltation, the
Stone was perfected.

Here are two birds, great and strong—the body and spirit; one
devours the other.

Let the body be placed in horse-dung, or a warm bath, the spirit
having been extracted from it. The body has become white by the
process, the spirit red by our art. All that exists tends towards perfection,
and thus is the Philosopher’s Stone prepared.

FIG. V.

The author of The Open Entrance speaks of the
various stages in the perfecting of the agent as
regimens. The beginning of the heating of gold
with mercury is likened to the king stripping off
his golden garments and descending into the
fountain; this is the regimen of Mercury. As the
heating is continued, all becomes black; this is
the regimen of Saturn. Then is noticed a play of
many colours; this is the regimen of Jupiter: if
the heat is not regulated properly, “the young
ones of the crow will go back to the nest.”
About the end of the fourth month you will see
“the sign of the waxing moon,” and all becomes
white; this is the regimen of the Moon. The
white colour gives place to purple and green;
you are now in the regimen of Venus. After that,
appear all the colours of the rainbow, or of a
peacock’s tail; this is the regimen of Mars.
Finally the colour becomes orange and golden;
this is the regimen of the Sun.

The reader may wish to have some description
of the Essence. The alchemists could describe it
only in contraries. It had a bodily form, but its
method of working was spiritual. In The Sodic
Hydrolith, or Water Stone of the Wise we are told:—

Philalethes says, in A Brief Guide to the Celestial
Ruby: “The Philosopher’s Stone is a certain
heavenly, spiritual, penetrative, and fixed substance,
which brings all metals to the perfection
of gold or silver (according to the quality of the
Medicine), and that by natural methods, which
yet in their effects transcend Nature…. Know
then that it is called a stone, not because it is
like a stone, but only because, by virtue of its
fixed nature, it resists the action of fire as
successfully as any stone. In species it is gold,
more pure than the purest; it is fixed and
incombustible like a stone, but its appearance is
that of very fine powder, impalpable to the
touch, sweet to the taste, fragrant to the smell,
in potency a most penetrative spirit, apparently
dry and yet unctuous, and easily capable of
tinging a plate of metal…. If we say that its
nature is spiritual, it would be no more than
the truth; if we described it as corporeal, the
expression would be equally correct.”

The same author says: “There is a substance
of a metalline species which looks so cloudy that
the universe will have nothing to do with it. Its
visible form is vile; it defiles metalline bodies,
and no one can readily imagine that the pearly
drink of bright Phœbus should spring from
thence. Its components are a most pure and
tender mercury, a dry incarcerate sulphur,
which binds it and restrains fluxation…. Know
this subject, it is the sure basis of all our
secrets…. To deal plainly, it is the child of
Saturn, of mean price and great venom…. It
is not malleable, though metalline. Its colour is
sable, with intermixed argent which mark the
sable fields with veins of glittering argent.”

In trying to attach definite meanings to the
alchemical accounts of Principles, Elements, and
the One Thing, and the directions which the
alchemists give for changing one substance into
others, we are very apt to be misled by the use
of such an expression as the transmutation of the
elements. To a chemist that phrase means the
change of an element into another element, an
element being a definite substance, which no one
has been able to produce by the combination of
two or more substances unlike itself, or to
separate into two or more substances unlike
itself. But whatever may have been the alchemical
meaning of the word element, it was
certainly not that given to the same word to-day.
Nor did the word transmutation mean to the
alchemist what it means to the chemist.

The facts which are known at present concerning
the elements make unthinkable such a
change as that of lead into silver; but new
facts may be discovered which will make possible
the separation of lead into things unlike itself,
and the production of silver by the combination
of some of these constituents of lead. The alchemist
supposed he knew such facts as enabled
him not only to form a mental picture of the
change of lead into silver, or tin into gold, but
also to assert that such changes must necessarily
happen, and to accomplish them. Although we
are quite sure that the alchemist’s facts were
only imaginings, we ought not to blame him for
his reasoning on what he took to be facts.

Every metal is now said to be an element, in
the modern meaning of that word: the alchemist
regarded the metals as composite substances;
but he also thought of them as more simple than
many other things. Hence, if he was able to
transmute one metal into another, he would
have strong evidence in support of his general
conception of the unity of all things. And, as
transmutation meant, to the alchemist, the
bringing of a substance to the condition of
greatest perfection possible for that substance,
his view of the unity of nature might be said to
be proved if he succeeded in changing one of the
metals, one of these comparatively simple
substances, into the most perfect of all metals,
that is, into gold.

The transmutation of the baser metals into
gold thus came to be the practical test of the
justness of the alchemical scheme of things.

Some alchemists assert they had themselves
performed the great transmutation; others tell
of people who had accomplished the work. The
following story is an example of the accounts
given of the making of gold. It is taken from
John Frederick Helvetius’ Golden Calf, which the
world worships and adores (17th century):—

CHAPTER VI.

ALCHEMY AS AN EXPERIMENTAL ART.

A modern writer, Mr A.E. Waite, in his Lives
of the Alchemystical Philosophers, says: “The
physical theory of transmutation is based on the
composite character of the metals, on their
generation in the bowels of the earth, and on the
existence in nature of a pure and penetrating
matter which applied to any substance exalts and
perfects it after its own kind.” It must he
admitted that the alchemists could cite many
instances of transmutations which seemed to
lead to the conclusion, that there is no difference
of kind between the metals and other substances
such as water, acids, oils, resins, and wood. We
are able to-day to effect a vast number of transformations
wherein one substance is exchanged
for another, or made to take the place of another.
We can give fairly satisfactory descriptions of
these changes; and, by comparing them one
with another, we are able to express their
essential features in general terms which can
be applied to each particular instance. The
alchemists had no searching knowledge of what
may be called the mechanism of such changes;
they gave an explanation of them which we
must call incorrect, in the present state of our
knowledge. But, as Hoefer says in his Histoire
de la Chimie, “to jeer at [the alchemical] theory
is to commit at once an anachronism and an
injustice…. Unless the world should finish
to-morrow, no one can have the pretension
to suppose that our contemporaries have said the
last word of science, and nothing will remain
for our descendants to discover, no errors for
them to correct, no theories for them to set
straight.”

FIG. VI. See p. 90.

FIG. VII. See p. 90.

FIG. VIII. See p. 91.

What kind of experimental evidence could an
alchemist furnish in support of his theory of
transmutation? In
answering this question,
I cannot do
better than give a
condensed rendering
of certain pages in
Hoefer’s Histoire
de la Chimie.

The reader is supposed
to be present
at experiments conducted
in the laboratory
of a Grand
Master of the Sacred
Art in the 5th or
6th century.

Experiment.—Ordinary water is boiled in an
open vessel; the water is changed to a vapour
which disappears, and a white powdery earth
remains in the vessel.

Conclusion.—Water is changed into air and
earth.

Did we not know that ordinary water holds
certain substances in solution, and that boiling
water acts on the vessel wherein it is boiled, we
should have no objection to urge against this
conclusion.

It only remained to transmute fire that the
transmutation of the four elements might be
completed.

Experiment.—A piece of red-hot iron is
placed in a bell-jar, filled with water, held over a basin
containing water; the volume of the water decreases,
and the air in the bell-jar takes fire when
a lighted taper is brought into it.

Conclusion.—Water is changed into fire.

That interpretation was perfectly reasonable
at a time when the fact was unknown that water
is composed of two gaseous substances; that one
of these (oxygen) is absorbed by the iron, and
the other (hydrogen) collects in the bell-jar,
and ignites when brought into contact with a
flame.

Experiment.—Lead, or any other metal except
gold or silver, is calcined in the air; the metal
loses its characteristic properties, and is changed
into a powdery substance, a kind of cinder or
calx. When this cinder, which was said to be the
result of the death of the metal, is heated in a
crucible with some grains of wheat, one sees the
metal revive, and resume its original form and
properties.

Conclusion.—The metal which had been destroyed
is revivified by the grains of wheat and the action of fire.

Is this not to perform the miracle of the
resurrection?

No objection can he raised to this interpretation,
as long as we are ignorant of the phenomena
of oxidation, and the reduction of oxides by
means of carbon, or organic substances rich in
carbon, such as sugar, flour, seeds, etc. Grains
of wheat were the symbol of life, and, by
extension, of the resurrection and eternal life.

FIG. IX. See p. 91.

Experiment.—Ordinary lead is calcined in a
cupel made of cinders or powdered bones; the
lead is changed to a cinder which disappears
into the cupel, and a button of silver remains.

Conclusion.—The lead has vanished; what
more natural than the conclusion that it has
been transformed into silver? It was not known
then that all specimens of lead contain more
or less silver.

FIG. X. See p. 92.

Experiment.-The vapour of arsenic bleaches
copper. This fact gave rise to many allegories
and enigmas concerning the means of transforming
copper into silver.

Sulphur, which acts on metals and changes
many of them into black substances, was looked on
as a very mysterious thing. It was with
sulphur that the coagulation (solidification) of
mercury was effected.

Experiment.—Mercury is allowed to fall, in a
fine rain, on to melted sulphur; a black substance
is produced; this black substance is heated in a
closed vessel, it is volatilised and transformed
into a beautiful red solid.

One could scarcely suppose that the black and
the red substances are identical, if one did not
know that they are composed of the same
quantities of the same elements, sulphur and
mercury.

How greatly must this phenomenon have affected
the imagination of the chemists of ancient times,
always so ready to be affected by everything that
seemed supernatural!

Black and red were the symbols of darkness
and light, of the evil and the good principle; and
the union of these two principles represented the
moral order. At a later time the idea helped to
establish the alchemical doctrine that sulphur
and mercury are the Principles of all things.

Experiment.—Various organic substances are
analysed by heating in a distillation-apparatus;
the products are, in each case, a solid residue,
liquids which distil off, and certain spirits which
are disengaged.

The results supported the ancient theory which
asserted that earth, water, air, and fire are the
four Elements of the world. The solid residue
represented earth; the liquid products of the
distillation, water; and the spirituous substances,
air. Fire was regarded sometimes as the means
of purification, sometimes as the soul, or invisible
part, of all substances.

Experiment.-A strong acid is poured on to
copper. The metal is attacked, and at last
disappears, giving place to a green liquid, as
transparent as water. A thin sheet of iron is
plunged into the liquid; the copper re-appears,
and the iron vanishes.

What more simple than to conclude that the
iron has been transformed into copper?

Had lead, silver, or gold been used in place of
copper, one would have said that the iron was
transformed into lead, silver, or gold.

In their search for “the pure and penetrating
matter which applied to any substance exalts and
perfects it after its own kind,” the alchemists
necessarily made many inventions, laid the
foundation of many arts and manufactures, and
discovered many facts of importance in the
science of chemistry.

The practitioners of the Sacred Art of Egypt
must have been acquainted with many operations
which we now class as belonging to applied
chemistry; witness, their jewellery, pottery, dyes
and pigments, bleaching, glass-making, working
in metals and alloys, and their use of spices,
essential oils, and soda in embalming, and for
other purposes.

During the centuries when alchemy flourished,
gunpowder was invented, the art of printing was
established, the compass was brought into use,
the art of painting and staining glass was begun
and carried to perfection, paper was made from
rags, practical metallurgy advanced by leaps and
bounds, many new alloys of metals came into
use, glass mirrors were manufactured, and considerable
advances were made in practical medicine
and sanitation.

FIG. XI. See p. 92.

Basil Valentine, who was one of the greatest
alchemists of the 16th century, discovered many
of the properties of the metal antimony, and
prepared and examined many compounds of that
metal; he made green vitriol from pyrites, brandy
from fermented grape-juice, fulminating gold,
sulphide of potash, and spirits of salt; he made
and used baths of artificial mineral waters, and
he prepared various metals by what are now
called wet methods, for instance, copper, by
immersing plates of iron in solutions of bluestone.
He examined the air of mines, and
suggested practical methods for determining
whether the air in a mine was respirable.
Hoefer draws attention to a remarkable observation
recorded by this alchemist. Speaking of
the “spirit of mercury,” Basil Valentine says it
is “the origin of all the metals; that spirit is
nothing else than an air flying here and there
without wings; it is a moving wind, which,
after it has been chased from its home of Vulcan (that
is, fire), returns to the chaos; then it expands
and passes into the region of the air from whence
it had come.” As Hoefer remarks, this is perhaps
one of the earliest accounts of the gas discovered
by Priestley and studied by Lavoisier, the gas we
now call oxygen, and recognise as of paramount
importance in chemical reactions.

FIG. XII. See p. 92.

Besides discovering and recording many facts
which have become part and parcel of the science
of chemistry, the alchemists invented and used
various pieces of apparatus, and conducted many
operations, which are still employed in chemical
laboratories. I shall reproduce illustrations of
some of these processes and pieces of apparatus,
and quote a few of the directions, given in a
book, published in 1664, called The Art of
Distillation, by John French, Dr. in Physick.

The method recommended by French for
hermetically sealing the neck of a glass vessel is
shown in Fig. VI. p. 80. The neck of the vessel is
surrounded by a tray containing burning coals;
when the glass melts it is cut off by shears, and
then closed by tongs, which are made hot
before use.

Fig. VII. p. 81, represents a method for covering
an open vessel, air-tight, with a receptacle into
which a substance may be sublimed from the
lower vessel. The lettering explains the method
of using the apparatus.

French gives very practical directions and
much sound advice for conducting distillations of
various kinds. The following are specimens of
his directions and advice:—

Fig. VIII. p. 82, represents a common cold still,
and Fig. IX. p. 84, is a sketch of an apparatus for
distilling by the aid of boiling water. The bath
wherein the vessels are placed in Fig. IX. was
called by the alchemists balneum Mariae, from Mary
the Jewess, who is mentioned in the older alchemical
writings, and is supposed to have invented an
apparatus of this character. Nothing definite is
known of Mary the Jewess. A writer of the 7th
century says she was initiated in the sacred art
in the temple of Memphis; a legend prevailed
among some of the alchemists that she was the
sister of Moses.

Fig. X. p. 85, represents methods of distilling
with an apparatus for cooling the volatile products;
the lower vessel is an alembic, with a long
neck, the upper part of which passes through a
vessel containing cold water.

Fig XIII. See p. 94.

Fig. XI. p. 88, shows a pelican, that is a vessel
wherein a liquid might be heated for a long time,
and the volatile products be constantly returned
to the original vessel.

Fig. XII. p. 89, represents a retort with a receiver.

Some of the pieces of apparatus for distilling,
which are described by French, are shown in the
following figures. Besides describing apparatus
for distilling, subliming, and other processes in the
laboratory, French gives directions for making
tinctures, essences, essential oils, spirits of salt, and
pure saltpetre, oil of vitriol, butter of antimony,
calces (or as we now say, oxides) of metals, and
many other substances. He describes processes for making
fresh water from salt, artificial mineral
water, medicated hot baths for invalids (one of
the figures represents an apparatus very like
those advertised to-day as “Turkish baths at
home”), and artificial precious stones; he tells
how to test minerals, and make alloys, and describes
the preparation of many substances made
from gold and silver. He also gives many curious
receipts; for instance, “To make Firre-trees
appear in Turpentine,” “To make a Plant grow
in two or three hours,” “To make the representation
of the whole world in a Glass,” “To extract
a white Milkie substance from the raies of the
Moon.”

FIG. XIV. See p. 94.

The process of making oil of vitriol, by burning
sulphur under a hood fitted with a side tube
for the outflow of the oil of vitriol, is represented
in Fig. XIII. p. 92.

Fig. XIV. p. 93, is interesting; it is an apparatus
for rectifying spirits, by distilling, and liquefying
only the most volatile portions of the distillate.
The spirituous liquor was heated, and the vapours
caused to traverse a long zigzag tube, wherein
the less volatile portions condensed to liquid,
which flowed back into the vessel; the vapour
then passed into another vessel, and then through a
second zigzag tube, and was finally cooled by water,
and the condensed liquid collected. This apparatus
was the forerunner of that used to-day,
for effecting the separation of liquids which boil
at different temperatures, by the process called
fractional distillation.

We should never forget that the alchemists
were patient and laborious workers, their theories
were vitally connected with their practice, and
there was a constant action and reaction between
their general scheme of things and many branches
of what we now call chemical manufactures. We
may laugh at many of their theories, and regret
that much useless material was accumulated by
them; we may agree with Boyle (end of 17th
century) when he likens the “hermetick philosophers,”
in their search for truth, to “the
navigators of Solomon’s Tarshish fleet, who
brought home from their long and tedious
voyages, not only gold, and silver, and ivory,
but apes and peacocks too; for so the writings
of several of your hermetick philosophers present
us, together with divers substantial and noble
experiments, theories, which either like peacocks’
feathers make a great show but are neither
solid nor useful; or else like apes, if they have some
appearance of being rational, are blemished with
some absurdity or other, that, when they are
attentively considered make them appear ridiculous.”
But however we may condemn their
method, because it rested on their own conception
of what the order of nature must be, we
cannot but praise their assiduity in conducting
experiments and gathering facts.

As Bacon says, in De Augmentis Scientiarum:

CHAPTER VII.

THE LANGUAGE OF ALCHEMY

The vagueness of the general conceptions of
alchemy, and the attribution of ethical qualities
to material things by the alchemists, necessarily
led to the employment of a language which is
inexact, undescriptive, and unsuggestive to modern
ears. The same name was given to different
things, and the same thing went under many
names. In Chapter IV. I endeavoured to analyse
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, illustrates 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.

It was impossible to express the alchemical
ideas in any language save that of far-fetched
allegory. The alchemical writings abound in
such allegories. Here are two of them.

The first allegory is taken from The Twelve Keys,
of Basilius Valentinus, the Benedictine:—

In the “Dedicatory Epistle” to his Triumphal
Chariot of Antimony, Basil Valentine addresses his
brother alchemists as follows:—

One result of the alchemical modes of expression
was, that he who tried to follow the directions
given in alchemical books got into dire
confusion. He did not know what substances to
use in his operations; for when he was told to
employ “the homogeneous water of gold,” for
example, the expression might mean anything,
and in despair he distilled, and calcined, and cohobated,
and tried to decompose everything he
could lay hands on. Those who pretended to
know abused and vilified those who differed from them.

In A Demonstration of Nature, by John A.
Mehung (17th century), Nature addresses the
alchemical worker in the following words:—

Henry Madathanas, writing in 1622, says:—

The author of The Only Way (1677) says:

Another writer speaks of many would-be alchemists
as “floundering about in a sea of specious book-learning.”

If alchemists could speak of their own processes
and materials as those authors spoke whom
I have quoted, we must expect that the alchemical
language would appear mere jargon to the uninitiated.
In Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist,
Surley, who is the sceptic of the piece, says to
Subtle, who is the alchemist—

To which Subtle answers,

The alchemists were very fond of using the
names of animals as symbols of certain mineral
substances, and of representing operations in
the laboratory by what may be called animal
allegories. The yellow lion was the alchemical
symbol of yellow sulphides, the red lion was
synonymous with cinnabar, and the green lion
meant salts of iron and of copper. Black
sulphides were called eagles, and sometimes
crows. When black sulphide of mercury is
strongly heated, a red sublimate is obtained,
which has the same composition as the black
compound; if the temperature is not kept
very high, but little of the red sulphide is produced;
the alchemists directed to urge the
fire, “else the black crows will go back to the nest.”

The salamander was called the king of
animals, because it was supposed that he
lived and delighted in fire; keeping a strong
fire alight under a salamander was sometimes
compared to the purification of gold by heating it.

Fig. XV., reduced from The Book of Lambspring
represents this process.

A salamander lives in the fire, which imparts to it a most glorious hue.

This is the reiteration, gradation, and amelioration of the Tincture,
or Philosopher’s Stone; and the whole is called its Augmentation.
FIG. XV.

The alchemists employed many signs, or shorthand
expressions, in place of writing the names of
substances. The following are a few of the signs
which were used frequently.

Saturn, also lead; Jupiter, also tin;
and Mars, also iron; Sol, also gold;
Venus, also copper; , and Mercury;
Luna, also silver; Sulphur; Vitriol;
fire; air; and water; earth;
aqua fortis; aqua regis; aqua vitæ;
day; night; Amalgam; Alembic.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DEGENERACY OF ALCHEMY.

I have tried to show that alchemy aimed at
giving experimental proof of a certain theory of
the whole system of nature, including
humanity. The practical culmination of the
alchemical quest presented a threefold aspect;
the alchemists sought the stone of wisdom, for
by gaining that they gained the control of
wealth; they sought the universal panacea,
for that would give them the power of enjoying
wealth and life; they sought the soul of
the world, for thereby they could hold communion
with spiritual existences, and enjoy
the fruition of spiritual life.

The object of their search was to satisfy their
material needs, their intellectual capacities, and
their spiritual yearnings. The alchemists of the
nobler sort always made the first of these objects
subsidiary to the other two; they gave as their
reason for desiring to make gold, the hope that
gold might become so common that it would cease
to be sought after by mankind. The author of An
Open Substance says: “Would to God … all men
might become adepts in our art, for then gold, the
common idol of mankind, would lose its value, and
we should prize it only for its scientific teaching.”

But the desire to make gold must always have
been a very powerful incentive in determining men
to attempt the laborious discipline of alchemy;
and with them, as with all men, the love of
money was the root of much evil. When a
man became a student of alchemy merely for
the purpose of making gold, and failed to make
it—as he always did—it was very easy for him
to pretend he had succeeded in order that he
might really make gold by cheating other
people. Such a man rapidly degenerated into
a charlatan; he used the language of alchemy
to cover his frauds, and with the hope of deluding
his dupes by high-sounding phrases.
And, it must be admitted, alchemy lent itself
admirably to imposture. It promised unlimited
wealth; it encouraged the wildest dreams of
the seeker after pleasure; and over these
dreams it cast the glamour of great ideas, the
idea of the unity of nature, and the idea of communion
with other spheres of life, of calling in
the help of ‘inheritors of unfulfilled renown,’ and
so it seemed to touch to fine issues the sordidness
of unblushing avarice.

Moreover, the working with strange ingredients
and odd-fashioned instruments, and the employment
of mouth-filling phrases, and scraps of
occult learning which seemed to imply unutterable
things, gave just that pleasing dash of
would-be wickedness to the process of consulting
the alchemist which acts as a fascination to many
people. The earnest person felt that by using
the skill and knowledge of the alchemists, for
what he deemed a good purpose, he was compelling
the powers of evil to work for him and
his objects.

It was impossible that such a system as
alchemy should appear to the plain man of the
middle ages, when the whole scheme of life and
the universe rested on a magical basis, to be more
than a kind of magic which hovered between the
black magic of the Sorcerer and the white magic
of the Church. Nor is it to be wondered at that
a system which lends itself to imposture so easily
as alchemy did, should be thought of by the plain
man of modern times as having been nothing but
a machinery of fraud.

It is evident from the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale in
Chaucer, that many of those who professed to
turn the base metals into gold were held in bad
repute as early as the 14th century. The “false
chanoun” persuaded the priest, who was his
dupe, to send his servant for quicksilver, which
he promised to make into “as good silver and as
fyn, As ther is any in youre purse or myn”; he
then gave the priest a “crosselet,” and bid him
put it on the fire, and blow the coals. While the
priest was busy with the fire,

The “false chanoun” pretended to be sorry for
the priest, who was so busily blowing the fire:—

As the coal burned the silver fell into the
“crosselet.” Then the canon said they would
both go together and fetch chalk, and a pail of
water, for he would pour out the silver he had
made in the form of an ingot. They locked the
door, and took the key with them. On returning,
the canon formed the chalk into a mould,
and poured the contents of the crucible into it.
Then he bade the priest,

The conclusion of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale
shows that, in the 14th century, there was a
general belief in the possibility of finding the
philosopher’s stone, and effecting the transmutation,
although the common practitioners of the
art were regarded as deceivers. A disciple of
Plato is supposed to ask his master to tell him
the “namè of the privee stoon.” Plato gives him
certain directions, and tells him he must use
magnasia; the disciple asks—

The belief in the possibility of alchemy seems
to have been general sometime before Chaucer
wrote; but that belief was accompanied by the
conviction that alchemy was an impious pursuit,
because the transmutation of baser metals into
gold was regarded as trenching on the prerogative
of the Creator, to whom alone this power rightfully
belonged. In his Inferno (which was
probably written about the year 1300), Dante
places the alchemists in the eighth circle of hell,
not apparently because they were fraudulent
impostors, but because, as one of them says, “I
aped creative nature by my subtle art.”

In later times, some of those who pretended
to have the secret and to perform great wonders
by the use of it, became rich and celebrated, and
were much sought after. The most distinguished
of these pseudo-alchemists was he who passed
under the name of Cagliostro. His life bears
witness to the eagerness of human beings to be
deceived.

Joseph Balsamo was born in 1743 at Palermo,
where his parents were tradespeople in a
good way of business.⁵ In the memoir of himself,
which he wrote in prison, Balsamo seeks to
surround his birth and parentage with mystery; he
says, “I am ignorant, not only of my birthplace,
but even of the parents who bore me….
My earliest infancy was passed in the town of
Medina, in Arabia, where I was brought up under
the name of Acharat.”

When he was thirteen years of age, Balsamo’s
parents determined he should be trained for the
priesthood, but he ran away from his school.
He was then confined in a Benedictine monastery.
He showed a remarkable taste for natural history,
and acquired considerable knowledge of the use
of drugs; but he soon tired of the discipline and
escaped. For some years he wandered about in
different parts of Italy, living by his wits and by
cheating. A goldsmith consulted him about a
hidden treasure; he pretended to invoke the aid of
spirits, frightened the goldsmith, got sixty
ounces of gold from him to carry on his incantations,
left him in the lurch, and fled to Messina.
In that town he discovered an aged aunt who
was sick; the aunt died, and left her money to
the Church. Balsamo assumed her family name,
added a title of nobility, and was known henceforward
as the Count Alessandro Cagliostro.

In Messina he met a mysterious person whom
he calls Altotas, and from whom, he says in his
Memoir, he learnt much. The following account
of the meeting of Balsamo and the stranger is
taken from Waite’s book: “As he was promenading
one day near the jetty at the extremity of
the port he encountered an individual singularly
habited and possessed of a most remarkable
countenance. This person, aged apparently
about fifty years, seemed to be an Armenian,
though, according to other accounts, he was a
Spaniard or Greek. He wore a species of caftan,
a silk bonnet, and the extremities of his breeches
were concealed in a pair of wide boots. In his
left hand he held a parasol, and in his right the end of a cord, to
which was attached a graceful
Albanian greyhound…. Cagliostro saluted this
grotesque being, who bowed slightly, but with
satisfied dignity. ‘You do not reside in Messina,
signor?’ he said in Sicilian, but with a marked
foreign accent. Cagliostro replied that he was
tarrying for a few days, and they began to converse
on the beauty of the town and on its
advantageous situation, a kind of Oriental imagery
individualising the eloquence of the stranger,
whose remarks were, moreover, adroitly adorned
with a few appropriate compliments.”

Although the stranger said he received no one
at his house he allowed Cagliostro to visit him.
After various mysterious doings the two went
off to Egypt, and afterwards to Malta, where
they performed many wonderful deeds before
the Grand Master, who was much impressed.
At Malta Altotas died, or, at anyrate, vanished.
Cagliostro then travelled for some time, and was
well received by noblemen, ambassadors, and
others in high position. At Rome he fell in love
with a young and beautiful lady, Lorenza
Feliciani, and married her.

Cagliostro used his young wife as a decoy to
attract rich and foolish men. He and his wife
thrived for a time, and accumulated money
and jewels; but a confederate betrayed them, and
they fled to Venice, and then wandered for
several years in Italy, France, and England.
They seem to have made a living by the sale of
lotions for the skin, and by practising skilful
deceptions.

About the year 1770 Cagliostro began to pose
as an alchemist. After another period of
wandering he paid a second visit to London
and founded a secret society, based on (supposed)
Egyptian rites, mingled with those of freemasonry.
The suggestion of this society is said
to have come from a curious book he picked up
on a second-hand stall in London. The society
attracted people by the strangeness of its initiatory
rites, and the promises of happiness and wellbeing
made by its founder to those who joined it.
Lodges were established in many countries,
many disciples were obtained, great riches were
amassed, and Cagliostro flourished exceedingly.

In his Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps
modernes, Figuier, speaking of Cagliostro about
this period of his career, says:

“He proclaimed himself the bearer of the
mysteries of Isis and Anubis from the far East….
He obtained numerous and distinguished
followers, who on one occasion assembled in great
force to hear Joseph Balsamo expound to them
the doctrines of Egyptian freemasonry. At this
solemn convention he is said to have spoken with
overpowering eloquence;… his audience
departed in amazement and completely converted
to the regenerated and purified masonry. None
doubted that he was an initiate of the arcana of
nature, as preserved in the temple of Apis at the
era when Cambyses belaboured that capricious
divinity. From this moment the initiations into
the new masonry were numerous, albeit they
were limited to the aristocracy of society. There
are reasons to believe that the grandees who
were deemed worthy of admission paid exceedingly
extravagantly for the honour.”

Cagliostro posed as a physician, and claimed
the power of curing diseases simply by the
laying on of hands. He went so far as to assert he
had restored to life the dead child of a nobleman
in Paris; the discovery that the miracle was
effected by substituting a living child for the
dead one caused him to flee, laden with spoil, to
Warsaw, and then to Strassburg.

Cagliostro entered Strassburg in state, amid an
admiring crowd, who regarded him as more than
human. Rumour said he had amassed vast
riches by the transmutation of base metals into
gold. Some people in the crowd said he was the
wandering Jew, others that he had been present
at the marriage feast of Cana, some asserted he
was born before the deluge, and one supposed he
might be the devil. The goldsmith whom he
had cheated of sixty ounces of gold many years
before was in the crowd, and, recognising him,
tried to stop the carriage, shouting: “Joseph
Balsamo! It is Joseph! Rogue, where are my
sixty ounces of gold?” “Cagliostro scarcely
deigned to glance at the furious goldsmith; but
in the middle of the profound silence which the
incident occasioned among the crowd, a voice,
apparently in the clouds, uttered with great
distinctness the following words: ‘Remove this
lunatic, who is possessed by infernal spirits.’
Some of the spectators fell on their knees,
others seized the unfortunate goldsmith, and the
brilliant cortege passed on” (Waite).

From Strassburg Cagliostro went to Paris, where
he lived in great splendour, curing diseases,
making gold and diamonds, mystifying and
duping people of all ranks by the splendid ritual
and gorgeous feasting of his secret society, and
amassing riches. He got entangled in the affair
of the Diamond Necklace, and left Paris.
Trying to advance his society in Italy he was
arrested by the agents of the Inquisition, and
imprisoned, then tried, and condemned to death.
The sentence was commuted to perpetual imprisonment.
After two years in the prison of
San Angelo he died at the age of fifty.

CHAPTER IX.

PARACELSUS AND SOME OTHER ALCHEMISTS.

The accounts which have come to us of the men
who followed the pursuit of the One Thing are
vague, scrappy, and confusing.

Alchemical books abound in quotations from
the writings of Geber. Five hundred treatises
were attributed to this man during the middle
ages, yet we have no certain knowledge of his
name, or of the time or place of his birth.
Hoefer says he probably lived in the middle of
the 8th century, was a native of Mesopotamia,
and was named Djabar Al-Konfi. Waite calls
him Abou Moussah Djafar al-Sofi. Some of the
mediæval adepts spoke of him as the King of
India, others called him a Prince of Persia.
Most of the Arabian writers on alchemy and
medicine, after the 9th century, refer to Geber
as their master.

All the MSS. of writings attributed to Geber
which have been examined are in Latin, but the
library of Leyden is said to possess some works
by him written in Arabic. These MSS. contain
directions for preparing many metals, salts, acids,
oils, etc., and for performing such operations as
distillation, cupellation, dissolution, calcination,
and the like.

Of the other Arabian alchemists, the most celebrated
in the middle ages were Rhasis, Alfarabi,
and Avicenna, who are supposed to have lived in
the 9th and 10th centuries.

The following story of Alfarabi’s powers is
taken from Waite’s Lives of the Alchemystical
Philosophers:—

The most remarkable of the alchemists was he
who is generally known as Paracelsus. He was
born about 1493, and died about 1540. It is probable
that the place of his birth was Einsiedeln,
near Zurich. He claimed relationship with the
noble family of Bombast von Hohenheim; but
some of his biographers doubt whether he really
was connected with that family. His name,
or at any rate the name by which he was known, was
Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast
von Hohenheim. His father in alchemy, Trimethius, Abbot
of Spannheim and then of Wurzburg, who was a theologian, a poet, an
astronomer, and a necromancer, named him
Paracelsus; this name is taken by some to be
a kind of Græco-Latin paraphrase of von Hohenheim
(of high lineage), and to mean “belonging
to a lofty place”; others say it signifies “greater
than Celsus,” who was a celebrated Latin writer on medicine
of the 1st century. Paracelsus studied at the University of Basle; but,
getting into trouble with the authorities, he left the university,
and for some years wandered over Europe, supporting
himself, according to one account, by
“psalm-singing, astrological productions, chiromantic
soothsaying, and, it has been said, by
necromantic practices.” He may have got as
far as Constantinople; as a rumour floated about
that he received the Stone of Wisdom from an
adept in that city. He returned to Basle, and
in 1527 delivered lectures with the sanction
of the Rector of the university. He made
enemies of the physicians by abusing their
custom of seeking knowledge only from ancient
writers and not from nature; he annoyed the
apothecaries by calling their tinctures, decoctions,
and extracts, mere soup-messes; and he roused the
ire of all learned people by delivering his lectures
in German. He was attacked publicly and also
anonymously. Of the pamphlets published
against him he said, “These vile ribaldries
would raise the ire of a turtle-dove.” And
Paracelsus was no turtle-dove. The following
extract from (a translation of) the preface to
The Book concerning the Tinctures of the Philosophers
written against those Sophists born since the Deluge,
shews that his style of writing was abusive, and
his opinion of himself, to say the least, not very
humble:—

The turbulent and restless spirit of Paracelsus
brought him into open conflict with the authorities
of Basle. He fled from that town in 1528, and
after many wanderings, he found rest at Salzburg,
under the protection of the archbishop. He died
at Salzburg in 1541, in his forty-eighth year.

The character and abilities of Paracelsus have
been vastly praised by some, and inordinately
abused by others. One author says of him: “He
lived like a pig, looked like a drover, found his
greatest enjoyment in the company of the most
dissolute and lowest rabble, and throughout his
glorious life he was generally drunk.” Another
author says: “Probably no physician has grasped
his life’s task with a purer enthusiasm, or devoted
himself more faithfully to it, or more fully maintained
the moral worthiness of his calling than
did the reformer of Einsiedeln.” He certainly
seems to have been loved and respected by his
pupils and followers, for he is referred to by
them as “the noble and beloved monarch,” “the
German Hemes,” and “our dear Preceptor and
King of Arts.”

There seems no doubt that Paracelsus discovered
many facts which became of great importance in
chemistry: he prepared the inflammable gas we
now call hydrogen, by the reaction between iron
filings and oil of vitriol; he distinguished metals
from substances which had been classed with
metals but lacked the essential metalline character
of ductility; he made medicinal preparations of
mercury, lead and iron, and introduced many new
and powerful drugs, notably laudanum. Paracelsus
insisted that medicine is a branch of
chemistry, and that the restoration of the body
of a patient to a condition of chemical equilibrium
is the restoration to health.

Paracelsus trusted in his method; he was
endeavouring to substitute direct appeal to nature
for appeal to the authority of writers about
nature. “After me,” he cries, “you Avicenna,
Galen, Rhasis, Montagnana and the others. You
after me, not I after you. You of Paris, you of
Montpellier, you of Swabia, of Meissen and
Vienna; you who come from the countries along
the Danube and the Rhine; and you, too, from
the Islands of the Ocean. Follow me. It is not
for me to follow you, for mine is the monarchy.”
But the work was too arduous, the struggle too
unequal. “With few appliances, with no accurate
knowledge, with no help from the work of others,
without polished and sharpened weapons, and
without the skill that comes from long handling
of instruments of precision, what could Paracelsus
effect in his struggle to wrest her secrets from
nature? Of necessity, he grew weary of the
task, and tried to construct a universe which
should be simpler than that most complex order
which refused to yield to his analysis.” And so
he came back to the universe which man constructs
for himself, and exclaimed—

We leave a great genius, with his own words
in our ears: “Have no care of my misery, reader;
let me bear my burden myself. I have two
failings: my poverty and my piety. My poverty
was thrown in my face by a Burgomaster who
had perhaps only seen doctors attired in silken
robes, never basking in tattered rags in the sunshine.
So it was decreed I was not a doctor.
For my piety I am arraigned by the parsons,
for … I do not at all love those who teach
what they do not themselves practise.”

CHAPTER X.

SUMMARY OF THE ALCHEMICAL DOCTRINE.—THE
REPLACEMENT OF THE THREE PRINCIPLES OF
THE ALCHEMISTS BY THE SINGLE PRINCIPLE
OF PHLOGISTON.

The Sacred Art, which had its origin and home
in Egypt, was very definitely associated with the
religious rites, and the theological teaching, recognised
by the state. The Egyptian priests
were initiated into the mysteries of the divine
art: and as the initiated claimed to imitate the
work of the deity, the priest was regarded by the
ordinary people as something more than a representative,
as a mirror, of the divinity. The
sacred art of Egypt was transmuted into alchemy
by contact with European thought and handicrafts,
and the tenets and mysticism of the Catholic
Church; and the conception of nature, which was
the result of this blending, prevailed from about
the 9th until towards the end of the 18th
century.

Like its predecessor, alchemy postulated an
orderly universe; but alchemy was richer in
fantastic details, more picturesquely embroidered,
more prodigal of strange fancies, than the sacred
art of Egypt.

The alchemist constructed his ordered scheme
of nature on the basis of the supposed universality
of life. For him, everything lived, and the life of
things was threefold. The alchemist thought he
recognised the manifestation of life in the form,
or body, of a thing, in its soul, and in its spirit.
Things might differ much in appearance, in
size, taste, smell, and other outward properties,
and yet be intimately related, because, according
to the alchemist, they were produced from the
same principles, they were animated by the same
soul. Things might resemble one another closely
in their outward properties and yet differ widely
in essential features, because, according to the
alchemist, they were formed from different
elements, in their spiritual properties they were
unlike. The alchemists taught that the true
transformation, in alchemical language the transmutation,
of one thing into another could be
effected only by spiritual means acting on the
spirit of the thing, because the transmutation
consisted essentially in raising the substance to
the highest perfection whereof it was capable;
the result of this spiritual action might become
apparent in the material form of the substance.
In attempting to apply such vague conceptions as
these, alchemy was obliged to use the language
which had been developed for the expression of
human emotions and desires, not only for the
explanation of the facts it observed, but also for
the bare recital of these facts.

The outlook of alchemy on the world outside
human beings was essentially anthropomorphic.
In the image of man, the alchemist created his
universe.

In the times when alchemy was dominant, the
divine scheme of creation, and the place given
to man in that scheme, were supposed to be
thoroughly understood. Everything had its
place, designed for it from the beginning, and
in that place it remained unless it were forced
from it by violent means. A great part of the
business of experimental alchemy was to discover
the natural position, or condition, of each substance;
and the discovery was to be made by
interpreting the facts brought to light by observation
and experiment by the aid of hypotheses
deduced from the general scheme of things which
had been formed independently of observation or
experiment. Alchemy was a part of magic; for
magic interprets and corrects the knowledge
gained by the senses by the touchstone of
generalisations which have been supplied, partly
by the emotions, and partly by extra-human
authority, and accepted as necessarily true.

The conception of natural order which regulates
the life of the savage is closely related to that
which guided the alchemists. The essential
features of both are the notion that everything
is alive, and the persuasion that things can be
radically acted on only by using life as a factor.
There is also an intimate connexion between
alchemy and witchcraft. Witches were people
who were supposed to make an unlawful use
of the powers of life; alchemists were often
thought to pass beyond what is permitted to
the creature, and to encroach on the prerogative
of the Creator.

The long duration of alchemy shows that it
appealed to some deep-seated want of human
beings. Was not that want the necessity for
the realisation of order in the universe? Men
were unwilling to wait until patient examination
of the facts of their own nature, and the facts of
nature outside themselves, might lead them to
the realisation of the interdependence of all
things. They found it easier to evolve a scheme
of things from a superficial glance at themselves
and their surroundings; naturally they adopted
the easier plan. Alchemy was a part of the plan
of nature produced by this method. The extraordinary
dominancy of such a scheme is testified
to by the continued belief in alchemy, although
the one experiment, which seems to us to be the
crucial experiment of the system, was never
accomplished. But it is also to be remembered
that the alchemists were acquainted with, and
practised, many processes which we should now
describe as operations of manufacturing and
technical chemistry; and the practical usefulness
of these processes bore testimony, of the
kind which convinces the plain man, to the
justness of their theories.

I have always regarded two facts as most
interesting and instructive: that the doctrine
of the essential unity of all things, and the
simplicity of natural order, was accepted for
centuries by many, I think one may say, by most
men, as undoubtedly a true presentation of the
divine scheme of things; and, secondly, that in
more recent times people were quite as certain of
the necessary truth of the doctrine, the exact
opposite of the alchemical, that the Creator had
divided his creation into portions each of which
was independent of all the others. Both of these
schemes were formed by the same method, by
introspection preceding observation; both were
overthrown by the same method, by observation
and experiment proceeding hand in hand with
reasoning. In each case, the humility of science
vanquished the conceit of ignorance.

The change from alchemy to chemistry is an
admirable example of the change from a theory
formed by looking inwards, and then projected
on to external facts, to a theory formed by
studying facts, and then thinking about them.
This change proceeded slowly; it is not possible
to name a time when it may be said, here
alchemy finishes and chemistry begins. To
adapt a saying of one of the alchemists, quoted
in a former chapter; alchemy would not easily
give up its nature, and fought for its life; but
an agent was found strong enough to overcome
and kill it, and then that agent also had
the power to change the lifeless remains into a
new and pure body. The agent was the accurate
and imaginative investigation of facts.

The first great step taken in the path which
led from alchemy to chemistry was the substitution
of one Principle, the Principle of Phlogiston,
for the three Principles of salt, sulphur, and
mercury. This step was taken by concentrating
attention and investigation, by replacing the
superficial examination of many diverse phenomena
by the more searching study of one class
of occurrences. That the field of study should
be widened, it was necessary that it should first
be narrowed.

Lead, tin, iron, or copper is calcined. The
prominent and striking feature of these events is
the disappearance of the metal, and the formation
of something very unlike it. But the original
metal is restored by a second process, which is
like the first because it also is a calcination, but
seems to differ from the first operation in that
the burnt metal is calcined with another substance,
with grains of wheat or powdered charcoal.
Led thereto by their theory that destruction
must precede re-vivification, death must
come before resurrection, the alchemists confined
their attention to one feature common to all calcinations
of metals, and gave a superficial description
of these occurrences by classing them
together as processes of mortification. Sulphur,
wood, wax, oil, and many other things are easily
burned: the alchemists said, these things also
undergo mortification, they too are killed; but,
as “man can restore that which man has
destroyed,” it must be possible to restore to
life the thing which has been mortified. The
burnt sulphur, wood, wax, or oil, is not really
dead, the alchemists argued; to use the allegory
of Paracelsus, they are like young lions which
are born dead, and are brought to life by the
roaring of their parents: if we make a sufficiently
loud noise, if we use the proper means, we shall
bring life into what seems to be dead material.
As it is the roaring of the parents of the young
lions which alone can cause the still-born cubs to
live, so it is only by the spiritual agency of life,
proceeded the alchemical argument, that life can
be brought into the mortified sulphur, wood, wax,
and oil.

The alchemical explanation was superficial,
theoretical, in the wrong meaning of that word,
and unworkable. It was superficial because it
overlooked the fact that the primary calcination,
the mortification, of the metals, and the other
substances, was effected in the air, that is to say,
in contact with something different from the
thing which was calcined; the explanation was
of the kind which people call theoretical, when
they wish to condemn an explanation and put it
out of court, because it was merely a re-statement
of the facts in the language of a theory which had
not been deduced from the facts themselves, or
from facts like those to be explained, but from
what were supposed to be facts without proper
investigation, and, if facts, were of a totally
different kind from those to which the explanation
applied; and lastly, the explanation was unworkable,
because it suggested no method whereby
its accuracy could be tested, no definite line
of investigation which might be pursued.

That great naturalist, the Honourable Robert
Boyle (born in 1626, died in 1691), very perseveringly
besought those who examined processes
of calcination to pay heed to the action of
everything which might take part in the processes.
He was especially desirous they should consider
what part the air might play in calcinations; he
spoke of the air as a “menstruum or additament,”
and said that, in such operations as calcination,
“We may well take the freedom to
examine … whether there intervene not a
coalition of the parts of the body wrought upon
with those of the menstruum, whereby the produced
concrete may be judged to result from the
union of both.”

It was by examining the part played by
the air in processes of calcination and burning
that men at last became able to give approximately
complete descriptions of these processes.

Boyle recognised that the air is not a simple
or elementary substance; he spoke of it as “a
confused aggregate of effluviums from such
differing bodies, that, though they all agree in
constituting by their minuteness and various
motions one great mass of fluid matter, yet perhaps
there is scarce a more heterogeneous body
in the world.” Clement of Alexandria who lived
in the end of the 2nd, and the early part of
the 3rd, century A.D., seems to have regarded
the air as playing a very important part in
combustions; he said—”Airs are divided into
two categories; an air for the divine flame, which
is the soul; and a material air which is the
nourisher of sensible fire, and the basis of combustible
matter.” Sentences like that I have just
quoted are found here and there in the writings
of the earlier and later alchemists; now and
again we also find statements which may be interpreted,
in the light of the fuller knowledge we
now have, as indicating at least suspicions that
the atmosphere is a mixture of different kinds
of air, and that only some of these take part
in calcining and burning operations. Those
suspicions were confirmed by experiments on
the calcination of metals and other substances,
conducted in the 17th century by Jean Rey
a French physician, and by John Mayow of
Oxford. But these observations and the conclusions
founded on them, did not bear much
fruit until the time of Lavoisier, that is, towards
the close of the 18th century. They were overshadowed
and put aside by the work of Stahl
(1660-1724). Some of the alchemists of the
14th, 15th and 16th centuries taught that combustion
and calcination are processes wherein the
igneous principle is destroyed, using the word
“destroyed” in its alchemical meaning. This
description of processes of burning was much
more in keeping with the ideas of the time than
that given by Boyle, Rey and Mayow. It was
adopted by Stahl, and made the basis of a general
theory of those changes wherein one substance
disappears and another, or others, very unlike it,
are produced.

That he might bring into one point of view,
and compare the various changes effected by the
agency of fire, Stahl invented a new Principle,
which he named Phlogiston, and constructed an
hypothesis which is generally known as the
phlogistic theory. He explained, and applied,
this hypothesis in various books, especially in
one published at Halle in 1717.

Stahl observed that many substances which
differed much from one another in various respects
were alike in one respect; they were all
combustible. All the combustible substances, he
argued, must contain a common principle; he
named this supposed principle, phlogiston (from
the Greek word phlogistos = burnt, or set on fire).
Stahl said that the phlogiston of a combustible
thing escapes as the substance burns, and, becoming
apparent to the senses, is named fire or
flame. The phlogiston in a combustible substance
was supposed to be so intimately associated
with something else that our senses cannot perceive
it; nevertheless, the theory said, it is there;
we can see only the escaping phlogiston, we can
perceive only the phlogiston which is set free
from its combination with other things. The
theory thought of phlogiston as imprisoned in
the thing which can be burnt, and as itself forming
part of the prison; that the prisoner should
be set free, the walls of the prison had to be
removed; the freeing of the prisoner destroyed
the prison. As escaping, or free, phlogiston was
called fire, or flame, so the phlogiston in a combustible
substance was sometimes called combined
fire, or flame in the state of combination. A
peculiarity of the strange thing called phlogiston
was that it preferred to be concealed in something,
hidden, imprisoned, combined; free
phlogiston
was supposed to be always ready to become
combined phlogiston.

The phlogistic theory said that what remains
when a substance has been burnt is the original
substance deprived of phlogiston; and, therefore,
to restore the phlogiston to the product of burning
is to re-form the combustible substance. But
how is such a restoration of phlogiston to be
accomplished? Evidently by heating the burnt
thing with something which is very ready to
burn. Because, according to the theory, everything
which can be burnt contains phlogiston,
the more ready a substance is to burn the richer
it is in phlogiston; burning is the outrush of
phlogiston, phlogiston prefers to be combined
with something; therefore, if you mix what
remains after burning, with something which is
very combustible, and heat the mixture, you are
bringing the burnt matter under conditions which
are very favourable for the reception of phlogiston
by it, for you are bringing it into intimate
contact with something from which freedom-hating
phlogiston is being forced to escape.

Charcoal, sulphur, phosphorus, oils and fats
are easily burnt; these substances were, therefore,
chosen for the purpose of changing things
which had been burnt into things which could
again be burnt; these, and a few other substances
like these, were classed together, and called phlogisticating
agents.

Very many of the substances which were dealt
with by the experimenters of the last quarter of
the 17th, and the first half of the 18th, century,
were either substances which could be burned,
or those which had been produced by burning;
hence the phlogistic theory brought into one
point of view, compared, and emphasised the
similarities between, a great many things which
had not been thought of as connected before that
theory was promulgated. Moreover, the theory
asserted that all combustible, or incinerable,
things are composed of phlogiston, and another
principle, or, as was often said, another element,
which is different in different kinds of combustible
substances. The metals, for instance, were said
to be composed of phlogiston and an earthy principle
or element, which was somewhat different
in different metals. The phlogisteans taught
that the earthy principle of a metal remains in
the form of ash, cinders, or calx, when the metal
is calcined, or, as they expressed it, when the
metal is deprived of its phlogiston.

The phlogistic theory savoured of alchemy; it
postulated an undefined, undefinable, intangible
Principle; it said that all combustible substances
are formed by the union of this Principle with
another, which is sometimes of an earthy character,
sometimes of a fatty nature, sometimes
highly volatile in habit. Nevertheless, the
theory of Stahl was a step away from purely
alchemical conceptions towards the accurate description
of a very important class of changes.
The principle of phlogiston could be recognised
by the senses as it was in the act of escaping
from a substance; and the other principle of
combustible things was scarcely a Principle in
the alchemical sense, for, in the case of metals
at any rate, it remained when the things which
had contained it were burnt, and could be seen,
handled, and weighed. To say that metals are
composed of phlogiston and an earthy substance,
was to express facts in such a language that the
expression might be made the basis of experimental
inquiry; it was very different from the
assertion that metals are produced by the spiritual
actions of the three Principles, salt, mercury and
sulphur, the first of which is not salt, the second
is not mercury, and the third is not sulphur.
The followers of Stahl often spoke of metals as
composed of phlogiston and an element of an
earthy character; this expression also was an
advance, from the hazy notion of Element in purely
alchemical writings, towards accuracy and fulness
of description. An element was now something
which could he seen and experimented
with; it was no longer a semi-spiritual existence
which could not be grasped by the senses.

The phlogistic theory regarded the calcination
of a metal as the separation of it into two things,
unlike the metal, and unlike each other; one of
these things was phlogiston, the other was an
earth-like residue. The theory thought of the
re-formation of a metal from its calx, that is, the
earthy substance which remains after combustion,
as the combination of two things to produce one,
apparently homogeneous, substance. Metals appeared
to the phlogisteans, as they appeared to
the alchemists, to be composite substances. Processes
of burning were regarded by alchemists
and phlogisteans alike, as processes of simplification.

The fact had been noticed and recorded, during
the middle ages, that the earth-like matter which
remains when a metal is calcined is heavier than
the metal itself. From this fact, modern investigators
of natural phenomena would draw the
conclusion, that calcination of a metal is an addition
of something to the metal, not a separation
of the metal into different things. It seems
impossible to us that a substance should be
separated into portions, and one of these parts
should weigh as much as, or more than, the
whole.

The exact investigation of material changes
called chemistry rests on the statement that
mass, and mass is practically measured by weight,
is the one property of what we call matter, the
determination whereof enables us to decide
whether a change is a combination, or coalescence,
of different things, or a separation of one
thing into parts. That any part of a material
system can be removed without the weight of
the portion which remains being less than the
original weight of the whole system, is unthinkable,
in the present state of our knowledge of
material changes.

But in the 17th century, and throughout
most of the 18th, only a few of those who
examined changes in the properties of substances
paid heed to changes of weight; they had not
realised the importance of the property of mass,
as measured by weight. The convinced upholder
of the phlogistic theory had two answers to the
argument, that, because the earth-like product of
the calcination of a metal weighs more than the
metal itself, therefore the metal cannot have lost
something in the process; for, if one portion of
what is taken away weighs more than the metal
from which it has been separated, it is evident
that the weight of the two portions into which
the metal is said to have been divided must be
considerably greater than the weight of the
undivided metal. The upholders of the theory
sometimes met the argument by saying, “Of
course the calx weighs more than the metal,
because phlogiston tends to lighten a body
which contains it; and therefore the body weighs
more after it has lost phlogiston than it did
when the phlogiston formed part of it;” sometimes,
and more often, their answer was—”loss
or gain of weight is an accident, the essential
thing is change of qualities.”

If the argument against the separation of a
metal into two constituents, by calcination, were
answered to-day as it was answered by the
upholders of the phlogistic theory, in the middle
of the 18th century, the answers would justly
be considered inconsequent and ridiculous. But
it does not follow that the statements were
either far-fetched or absurd at the time they
were made. They were expressed in the
phraseology of the time; a phraseology, it is
true, sadly lacking in consistency, clearness, and
appropriateness, but the only language then
available for the description of such changes as
those which happen when metals are calcined.
One might suppose that it must always have
sounded ridiculous to say that the weight of a
thing can be decreased by adding something to
it, that part of a thing weighs more than the
whole of it. But the absurdity disappears if it
can be admitted that mass, which is measured by
weight, may be a property like colour, or taste,
or smell; for the colour, taste, or smell of a
thing may certainly be made less by adding something
else, and the colour, taste, or smell of
a thing may also be increased by adding something
else. If we did not know that what we
call quantity of substance is measured by the
property named mass, we might very well accept
the proposition that the entrance of phlogiston
into a substance decreases the quantity, hence
the mass, and, therefore, the weight, of the
substance.

Although Stahl and his followers were
emerging from the trammels of alchemy, they
were still bound by many of the conceptions of
that scheme of nature. We have learned, in
previous chapters, that the central idea of
alchemy was expressed in the saying: “Matter
must be deprived of its properties in order to
draw out its soul.” The properties of substances
are everything to the modern chemist—indeed,
such words as iron, copper, water, and gold are
to him merely convenient expressions for certain
definable groups of properties—but the phlogisteans
regarded the properties of things, including
mass, as of secondary importance; they
were still trying to get beneath the properties of
a thing, to its hypothetical essence, or substance.

Looking back, we cannot think of phlogiston
as a substance, or as a thing, in the modern
meanings of these terms as they are used in
natural science. Nowadays we think, we are
obliged to think, of the sum of the quantities
of all the things in the universe as unchanging, and
unchangeable by any agency whereof we have
definite knowledge. The meaning we give to
the word thing rests upon the acceptance of this
hypothesis. But the terms substance, thing,
properties were used very vaguely a couple of
centuries ago; and it would be truly absurd to
carry back to that time the meanings which we
give to these terms to-day, and then to brand
as ridiculous the attempts of the men who studied,
then, the same problems which we study now, to
express the results of their study in generalisations
which employed the terms in question, in
what seems to us a loose, vague, and inexact
manner.

By asserting, and to some extent experimentally proving,
the existence of one principle in many
apparently very different substances (or, as would
be said to-day, one property common to many
substances), the phlogistic theory acted as a very
useful means for collecting, and placing in a
favourable position for closer inspection, many
substances which would probably have remained
scattered and detached from one another had
this theory not been constructed. A single
assumption was made, that all combustible
substances are alike in one respect, namely, in
containing combined fire, or phlogiston; by the
help of this assumption, the theory of phlogiston
emphasised the fundamental similarity between
all processes of combustion. The theory of
phlogiston was extraordinarily simple, compared
with the alchemical vagaries which preceded it.
Hoefer says, in his Histoire de la Chimie, “If it is
true that simplicity is the distinctive character
of verity, never was a theory so true as that of
Stahl.”

The phlogistic theory did more than serve as a
means for bringing together many apparently
disconnected facts. By concentrating the attention
of the students of material changes on
one class of events, and giving descriptions of
these events without using either of the four
alchemical Elements, or the three Principles,
Stahl, and those who followed him, did an
immense service to the advancement of clear
thinking about natural occurrences. The principle
of phlogiston was more tangible, and more
readily used, than the Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury
of the alchemists; and to accustom people to
speak of the material substance which remained
when a metal, or other combustible substance,
was calcined or burnt, as one of the elements of
the thing which had been changed, prepared the
way for the chemical conception of an element
as a definite substance with certain definite
properties.

In addition to these advantages, the phlogistic
theory was based on experiments, and led to
experiments, the results of which proved that the
capacity to undergo combustion might be conveyed
to an incombustible substance, by causing
it to react with some other substance, itself
combustible, under definite conditions. The
theory thus prepared the way for the representation
of a chemical change as an interaction
between definite kinds of substances, marked by
precise alterations both of properties and composition.

The great fault of the theory of phlogiston,
considered as a general conception which brings
many facts into one point of view, and leads the
way to new and exact knowledge, was its looseness,
its flexibility. It was very easy to make
use of the theory in a broad and general way; by
stretching it here, and modifying it there, it
seemed to cover all the facts concerning combustion
and calcination which were discovered
during two generations after the publication of
Stahl’s books. But many of the subsidiary
hypotheses which were required to make the
theory cover the new facts were contradictory,
or at any rate seemed to be contradictory, of the
primary assumptions of the theory. The addition
of this ancillary machinery burdened the
mechanism of the theory, threw it out of order,
and finally made it unworkable. The phlogistic
theory was destroyed by its own cumbersomeness.

A scientific theory never lasts long if its fundamental
assumptions are stated so loosely that they
may be easily modified, expanded, contracted, and
adjusted to meet the requirements of newly discovered
facts. It is true that the theories which
have been of the greatest service in science, as
summaries of the relations between established
facts, and suggestions of lines of investigation,
have been stated in terms whose full meaning
has gradually unfolded itself. But the foundations
of these theories have been at once so rigidly
defined and clearly stated as to be incapable of
essential modification, and so full of meaning and
widely applicable as to cover large classes of facts which
were unknown when the theories were
constructed. Of the founders of the lasting and
expansible theories of natural science, it may
be said, that “thoughts beyond their thoughts to
those high bards were given.”

CHAPTER XI.

THE EXAMINATION OF THE PHENOMENA OF
COMBUSTION.

The alchemists thought that the most effectual
method of separating a complex substance into
more simple substances was to subject it to the
action of heat. They were constantly distilling,
incinerating, subliming, heating, in order that the
spirit, or inner kernel of things, might be obtained.
They took for granted that the action of fire was
to simplify, and that simplification proceeded
whatever might be the nature of the substance
which was subjected to this action. Boyle
insisted that the effect of heating one substance
may be, and often is, essentially different
from the effect of heating another substance;
and that the behaviour of the same substance
when heated, sometimes varies when the conditions
are changed. He takes the example of
heating sulphur or brimstone: “Exposed to a
moderate fire in subliming pots, it rises all into
dry, and almost tasteless, flowers; whereas being
exposed to a naked fire, it affords store of a
saline and fretting liquor.” Boyle thought that
the action of fire was not necessarily to separate
a thing into its principles or elements, but, in most
cases, was either to rearrange the parts of the
thing, so that new, and it might be, more complex
things, were produced, or to form less simple
things by the union of the substance with what
he called, “the matter of fire.” When the product
of heating a substance, for example, tin
or lead, weighed more than the substance itself,
Boyle supposed that the gain in weight was often
caused by the “matter of fire” adding itself to
the substance which was heated. He commended
to the investigation of philosophers this “subtil
fluid,” which is “able to pierce into the compact
and solid bodies of metals, and add something to
them that has no despicable weight upon the
balance, and is able for a considerable time to
continue fixed in the fire.” Boyle also drew
attention to the possibility of action taking
place between a substance which is heated and
some other substance, wherewith the original
thing may have been mixed. In a word, Boyle
showed that the alchemical assumption—fire
simplifies—was too simple; and he taught, by
precept and example, that the only way of
discovering what the action of fire is, on this
substance or on that, is to make accurate experiments.
“I consider,” he says, “that, generally
speaking, to render a reason of an effect or
phenomenon, is to deduce it from something
else in nature more known than itself; and
that consequently there may be divers kinds
of degrees of explication of the same thing.”

Boyle published his experiments and opinions
concerning the action of fire on different substances
in the seventies of the 17th century;
Stahl’s books, which laid the foundation of the
phlogistic theory, and confirmed the alchemical
opinion that the action of fire is essentially a
simplifying action, were published about forty
years later. But fifty years before Boyle, a
French physician, named Jean Rey, had noticed
that the calcination of a metal is the production
of a more complex, from a less complex substance;
and had assigned the increase in weight which
accompanies that operation to the attachment of
particles of the air to the metal. A few years
before the publication of Boyle’s work, from
which I have quoted, John Mayow, student of
Oxford, recounted experiments which led to the
conclusion that the air contains two substances, one
of which supports combustion and the breathing of
animals, while the other extinguishes fire. Mayow
called the active component of the atmosphere
fiery air; but he was unable to say definitely what
becomes of this fiery air when a substance is
burnt, although he thought that, in some cases,
it probably attaches itself to the burning substances,
by which, therefore, it may be said
to be fixed. Mayow proved that the air wherein
a substance is burnt, or an animal breathes,
diminishes in volume during the burning, or the
breathing. He tried, without much success, to
restore to air that part of it which disappears
when combustion, or respiration, proceeds in it.

What happens when a substance is burnt in
the air? The alchemists answered this question
by asserting that the substance is separated or
analysed into things simpler than itself. Boyle
said: the process is not necessarily a simplification;
it may be, and certainly sometimes is,
the formation of something more complicated than
the original substance, and when this happens,
the process often consists in the fixation of “the
matter of fire” by the burning substance. Rey
said: calcination, of a metal at anyrate, probably
consists in the fixation of particles of air by the
substance which is calcined. Mayow answered
the question by asserting, on the ground of the
results of his experiments, that the substance
which is being calcined lays hold of a particular
constituent of the air, not the air as a whole.

Now, it is evident that if Mayow’s answer was
a true description of the process of calcination, or
combustion, it should be possible to separate the
calcined substance into two different things, one
of which would be the thing which was calcined,
and the other would be that constituent of the
air which had united with the burning, or calcining,
substance. It seems clear to us that the one
method of proving the accuracy of Mayow’s supposition
must be, to weigh a definite, combustible,
substance—say, a metal; to calcine this in a
measured quantity of air; to weigh the product,
and to measure the quantity of air which remains;
to separate the product of calcination into the
original metal, and a kind of air or gas; to prove
that the metal thus obtained is the same, and has
the same weight, as the metal which was calcined;
and to prove that the air or gas obtained from
the calcined metal is the same, both in quality
and quantity, as the air which disappeared in
the process of calcination.

This proof was not forthcoming until about a
century after the publication of Mayow’s work.
The experiments which furnished the proof were
rendered possible by a notable discovery made
on the 1st of August 1774, by the celebrated
Joseph Priestley.

Priestley prepared many “airs” of different
kinds: by the actions of acids on metals, by
allowing vegetables to decay, by heating beef,
mutton, and other animal substances, and by
other methods. He says: “Having procured a
lens of twelve inches diameter and twenty inches
focal distance, I proceeded with great alacrity to
examine, by the help of it, what kind of air a
great variety of substances, natural and factitious,
would yield…. With this apparatus, after a
variety of other experiments…. on the 1st of
August, 1774, I endeavoured to extract air from
mercurius calcinatus per se; and I presently found
that, by means of this lens, air was expelled
from it very readily. Having got about three or
four times as much as the bulk of my materials,
I admitted water to it, and found that it was not
imbibed by it. But what surprised me more
than I can well express was, that a candle burned
in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame….
I was utterly at a loss how to account
for it.”

FIG. XVI.

The apparatus used by Priestley, in his experiments
on different kinds of air, is represented in
Fig. XVI., which is reduced from an illustration
in Priestley’s book on Airs.

Priestley had made a discovery which was
destined to change Alchemy into Chemistry.
But he did not know what his discovery meant.
It was reserved for the greatest of all chemists,
Antoine Lavoisier, to use the fact stumbled on
by Priestley.

After some months Priestley began to think it
possible that the new “air” he had obtained from
calcined mercury might be fit for respiration.
To his surprise he found that a mouse lived in
this air much longer than in common air; the
new air was evidently better, or purer, than
ordinary air. Priestley measured what he called
the “goodness” of the new air, by a process of
his own devising, and concluded that it was
“between four and five times as good as common
air.”

Priestley was a thorough-going phlogistean.
He seems to have been able to describe the
results of his experiments only in the language
of the phlogistic theory; just as the results of
most of the experiments made to-day on the
changes of compounds of the element carbon
cannot be described by chemists except by
making use of the conceptions and the language
of the atomic and molecular theory.⁶

The upholder of the phlogistic theory could not
think of burning as possible unless there was
a suitable receptacle for the phlogiston of the
burning substance: when burning occurred in the
air, the part played by the air, according to the
phlogistic chemist, was to receive the expelled
phlogiston; in this sense the air acted as the
pabulum, or nourishment, of the burning substance.
Inasmuch as substances burned more
vigorously and brilliantly in the new air than in
common air, Priestley argued that the new air
was more ready, more eager, than ordinary air, to
receive phlogiston; and, therefore, that the new
air contained less phlogiston than ordinary air,
or, perhaps, no phlogiston. Arguing thus,
Priestley, of course, named the new aeriform
substance dephlogisticated air, and thought of it as
ordinary air deprived of some, or it might be all,
of its phlogiston.

The breathing of animals and the burning of
substances were supposed to load the atmosphere
with phlogiston. Priestley spoke of the atmosphere
as being constantly “vitiated,” “rendered
noxious,” “depraved,” or “corrupted” by processes
of respiration and combustion; he called
those processes whereby the atmosphere is
restored to its original condition (or “depurated,”
as he said), “dephlogisticating processes.”
As he had obtained his dephlogisticated air by
heating the calx of mercury, that is the powder
produced by calcining mercury in the air,
Priestley was forced to suppose that the calcination
of mercury in the air must be a more
complex occurrence than merely the expulsion of
phlogiston from the mercury: for, if the process
consisted only in the expulsion of phlogiston,
how could heating what remained produce
exceedingly pure ordinary air? It seemed
necessary to suppose that not only was phlogiston
expelled from mercury during calcination,
but that the mercury also imbibed some portion,
and that the purest portion, of the surrounding
air. Priestley did not, however, go so far as this;
he was content to suppose that in some way,
which he did not explain, the process of calcination
resulted in the loss of phlogiston by the
mercury, and the gain, by the dephlogisticated
mercury, of the property of yielding exceedingly
pure or dephlogisticated air when it was heated
very strongly.

Priestley thought of properties in much the
same way as the alchemists thought of them, as
wrappings, or coverings of an essential something,
from which they can be removed and
around which they can again be placed. The
protean principle of phlogiston was always at
hand, and, by skilful management, was ready to
adapt itself to any facts. Before the phenomena
of combustion could be described accurately, it
was necessary to do two things; to ignore
the theory of phlogiston, and to weigh and
measure all the substances which take part in
some selected processes of burning.

Looking back at the attempts made in the past
to describe natural events, we are often inclined
to exclaim, “Why did investigators bind themselves
with the cords of absurd theories; why
did they always wear blinkers; why did they
look at nature through the distorting mists
rising from their own imaginations?” We are
too ready to forget the tremendous difficulties
which beset the path of him who is seeking
accurate knowledge.

Forgetting that the statements wherein the men
of science of our own time describe the relations
between natural events are, and must be, expressed
in terms of some general conception,
some theory, of these relations; forgetting that
the simplest natural occurrence is so complicated
that our powers of description are incapable of
expressing it completely and accurately; forgetting
the uselessness of disconnected facts; we
are inclined to overestimate the importance of
our own views of nature’s ways, and to underestimate
the usefulness of the views of our
predecessors. Moreover, as naturalists have not
been obliged, in recent times, to make a complete
renunciation of any comprehensive theory wherein
they had lived and moved for many years, we
forget the difficulties of breaking loose from a
way of looking at natural events which has
become almost as real as the events themselves,
of abandoning a language which has expressed
the most vividly realised conceptions of generations
of investigators, of forming a completely
new mental picture of natural occurrences,
and developing a completely new language for
the expression of those conceptions and these
occurrences.

The younger students of natural science of
to-day are beginning to forget what their fathers
told them of the fierce battle which had to be
fought, before the upholders of the Darwinian
theory of the origin of species were able to
convince those for whom the older view, that
species are, and always have been, absolutely
distinct, had become a matter of supreme
scientific, and even ethical, importance.

A theory which has prevailed for generations
in natural science, and has been accepted and
used by everyone, can be replaced by a more
accurate description of the relations between
natural facts, only by the determination, labour,
and genius of a man of supreme power. Such
a service to science, and humanity, was rendered
by Darwin; a like service was done, more than
three-quarters of a century before Darwin, by
Lavoisier.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was born in Paris
in 1743. His father, who was a merchant in a
good position, gave his son the best education
which was then possible, in physical, astronomical,
botanical, and chemical science. At the age of
twenty-one, Lavoisier gained the prize offered by
the Government for devising an effective and
economical method of lighting the public streets.
From that time until, on the 8th of May 1794, the
Government of the Revolution declared,
“The Republic has no need of men of science,”
and the guillotine ended his life, Lavoisier continued
his researches in chemistry, geology,
physics, and other branches of natural science,
and his investigations into the most suitable
methods of using the knowledge gained by
naturalists for advancing the welfare of the
community.

In 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 assertion
that water can be changed into earth.
Lavoisier began his work on the transformations
of matter by demonstrating that this alleged
transmutation does not happen; and he did this
by weighing the water, the vessel, and the earthy
solid.

Lavoisier had constructed for him a pelican of
white glass (see Fig. XI., p. 88), with a stopper of
glass. He cleaned, dried, and weighed this
vessel; then he put into it rain-water which
he had distilled eight times; he heated the
vessel, removing the stopper from time to time
to allow the expanding air to escape, then put in
the stopper, allowed the vessel to cool, and
weighed very carefully. The difference between
the second and the first weighing was the weight
of water in the vessel. He then fastened the
stopper securely with cement, and kept
the apparatus at a temperature about 30° or 40°
below that of boiling water, for a hundred and
one days. At the end of that time a fine white
solid had collected on the bottom of the vessel.
Lavoisier removed the cement from the stopper,
and weighed the apparatus; the weight was
the same as it had been before the heating began.
He removed the stopper; air rushed in, with
a hissing noise. Lavoisier concluded that air had
not penetrated through the apparatus during the
process of heating. He then poured out the
water, and the solid which had formed in the
vessel, set them aside, dried, and weighed the
pelican; it had lost 17-4/10 grains. Lavoisier concluded
that the solid which had formed in the
water was produced by the solvent action of the
water on the glass vessel. He argued that if
this conclusion was correct, the weight of the
solid must be equal to the loss of weight suffered
by the vessel; he therefore separated the solid
from the water in which it was suspended, dried,
and weighed it. The solid weighed 4-9/10 grains.
Lavoisier’s conclusion seemed to be incorrect;
the weight of the solid, which was supposed to
be produced by the action of the water on the
vessel, was 12 1/2 grains less than the weight of
the material removed from the vessel. But some
of the material which was removed from the
vessel might have remained dissolved in the
water: Lavoisier distilled the water, which he
had separated from the solid, in a glass vessel,
until only a very little remained in the distilling
apparatus; he poured this small quantity into a
glass basin, and boiled until the whole of the water
had disappeared as steam. There remained a
white, earthy solid, the weight of which was 15 1/2
grains. Lavoisier had obtained 4 9/10 + 15 1/2 = 20 2/5
grains of solid; the pelican had lost 17 2/5 grains.
The difference between these weights, namely, 3
grains, was accounted for by Lavoisier as due to
the solvent action of the water on the glass
apparatus wherein it had been distilled, and on
the glass basin wherein it had been evaporated
to dryness.

Lavoisier’s experiments proved that when
distilled water is heated in a glass vessel, it
dissolves some of the material of the vessel, and
the white, earthy solid which is obtained by
boiling down the water is merely the material
which has been removed from the glass vessel.
His experiments also proved that the water does
not undergo any change during the process; that
at the end of the operation it is what it was at
the beginning—water, and nothing but water.

By this investigation Lavoisier destroyed part
of the experimental basis of alchemy, and established
the one and only method by which chemical
changes can be investigated; the method
wherein constant use is made of the balance.

Lavoisier now turned his attention to the
calcination of metals, and particularly the calcination
of tin. Boyle supposed that the increase in
weight which accompanies the calcination of a
metal is due to the fixation of “matter of fire”
by the calcining metal; Rey regarded the increase
in weight as the result of the combination
of the air with the metal; Mayow thought that
the atmosphere contains two different kinds of
“airs,” and one of these unites with the heated
metal. Lavoisier proposed to test these suppositions
by calcining a weighed quantity of tin in
a closed glass vessel, which had been weighed
before, and should be weighed after, the calcination.
If Boyle’s view was correct, the weight of
the vessel and the tin would be greater at the
end than it was at the beginning of the operation;
for “matter of fire” would pass through
the vessel and unite with the metal. If there
was no change in the total weight of the apparatus
and its contents, and if air rushed in
when the vessel was opened after the calcination,
and the total weight was then greater than at
the beginning of the process, it would be necessary
to adopt either the supposition of Rey or
that of Mayow.

Lavoisier made a series of experiments. The
results were these: there was no change in the
total weight of the apparatus and its contents;
when the vessel was opened after the calcination
was finished, air rushed in, and the whole apparatus
now weighed more than it did before the vessel
was opened; the weight of the air which rushed
in was exactly equal to the increase in the weight
of the tin produced by the calcination, in other
words, the weight of the inrushing air was exactly
equal to the difference between the weights
of the tin and the calx formed by calcining the tin.
Lavoisier concluded that to calcine tin is to cause
it to combine with a portion of the air wherein
it is calcined. The weighings he made showed
that about one-fifth of the whole weight of air in
the closed flask wherein he calcined tin had disappeared
during the operation.

Other experiments led Lavoisier to suspect
that the portion of the air which had united with
the tin was different from the portion which had
not combined with that metal. He, therefore,
set himself to discover whether there are different
kinds of “airs” in the atmosphere, and, if there
is more than one kind of “air,” what is the
nature of that “air” which combines with a
metal in the process of calcination. He proposed
to cause a metallic calx (that is, the substance
formed by calcining a metal in the air) to give
up the “air” which had been absorbed in its
formation, and to compare this “air” with
atmospheric air.

About this time Priestley visited Paris, saw
Lavoisier, and told him of the new “air” he had
obtained by heating calcined mercury. Lavoisier
saw the great importance of Priestley’s discovery;
he repeated Priestley’s experiment, and concluded
that the air, or gas, which he refers to in
his Laboratory Journal as “l’air dephlogistique
de M. Priestley” was nothing else than the purest
portion of the air we breathe. He prepared this
“air” and burned various substances in it. Finding
that very many of the products of these combustions
had the properties of acids, he gave to
the new “air” the name oxygen, which means the
acid-producer.

At a later time, Lavoisier devised and conducted
an experiment which laid bare the change
of composition that happens when mercury is
calcined in the air. He calcined a weighed
quantity of mercury for many days in a measured
volume of air, in an apparatus arranged so that
he was able to determine how much of the air
disappeared during the process; he collected and
weighed the red solid which formed on the
surface of the heated mercury; finally he heated
this red solid to a high temperature, collected
and measured the gas which was given off, and
weighed the mercury which was produced. The
sum of the weights of the mercury and the gas
which were produced by heating the calcined
mercury was equal to the weight of the calcined
mercury; and the weight of the gas produced by
heating the calcined mercury was equal to the
weight of the portion of the air which had disappeared
during the formation of the calcined
mercury. This experiment proved that the calcination
of mercury in the air consists in the
combination of a constituent of the air with the
mercury. Fig. XVII. (reduced from an illustration
in Lavoisier’s Memoir) represents the
apparatus used by Lavoisier. Mayow’s supposition
was confirmed.

FIG. XVII.

Lavoisier made many more experiments on
combustion, and proved that in every case the
component of the atmosphere which he had
named oxygen combined with the substance, or
with some part of the substance, which was
burned. By these experiments the theory of
Phlogiston was destroyed; and with its destruction,
the whole alchemical apparatus of Principles
and Elements, Essences and Qualities, Souls and
Spirits, disappeared.

CHAPTER XII.

THE RECOGNITION OF CHEMICAL CHANGES AS THE
INTERACTIONS OF DEFINITE SUBSTANCES.

The experimental study of combustion made by
Lavoisier proved the correctness of that part of
Stahl’s phlogistic theory which asserted that all
processes of combustion are very similar, but also
proved that this likeness consists in the combination
of a distinct gaseous substance with the
material undergoing combustion, and not in the
escape therefrom of the Principle of fire, as asserted
by the theory of Stahl. After about the year
1790, it was necessary to think of combustions
in the air as combinations of a particular gas, or
air, with the burning substances, or some portions
of them.

This description of processes of burning necessarily
led to a comparison of the gaseous
constituent of the atmosphere which played so
important a part in these processes, with the
substances which were burned; it led to the
examination of the compositions of many substances,
and made it necessary to devise a
language whereby these compositions could be
stated clearly and consistently.

We have seen, in former chapters, the extreme
haziness of the alchemical views of composition,
and the connexions between composition and
properties. Although Boyle⁷ had stated very
lucidly what he meant by the composition of a
definite substance, about a century before Lavoisier’s
work on combustion, nevertheless the
views of chemists concerning composition remained
very vague and incapable of definite
expression, until the experimental investigations
of Lavoisier enabled him to form a clear mental
picture of chemical changes as interactions
between definite quantities of distinct substances.

Let us consider some of the work of Lavoisier
in this direction. I select his experimental examination
of the interactions of metals and
acids.

Many experimenters had noticed that gases
(or airs, as they were called up till near the end
of the 18th century) are generally produced
when metals are dissolving in acids. Most of
those who noticed this said that the gases came
from the dissolving metals; Lavoisier said they
were produced by the decomposition of the acids.
In order to study the interaction of nitric acid
and mercury, Lavoisier caused a weighed quantity
of the metal to react with a weighed quantity of
the acid, and collected the gas which was produced;
when all the metal had dissolved, he
evaporated the liquid until a white solid was
obtained; he heated this solid until it was
changed to the red substance called, at that
time, red precipitate, and collected the gas produced.
Finally, Lavoisier strongly heated the
red precipitate; it changed to a gas, which he
collected, and mercury, which he weighed.

The weight of the mercury obtained by Lavoisier
at the end of this series of changes was the same,
less a few grains, as the weight of the mercury
which he had caused to react with the nitric acid.
The gas obtained during the solution of the metal
in the acid, and during the decomposition of the
white solid by heat, was the same as a gas which
had been prepared by Priestley and called by him
nitrous air; and the gas obtained by heating
the red precipitate was found to be oxygen. Lavoisier
then mixed measured volumes of oxygen
and “nitrous air,” standing over water; a red
gas was formed, and dissolved in the water, and
Lavoisier proved that the water now contained
nitric acid.

The conclusions regarding the composition of
nitric acid drawn by Lavoisier from these experiments
was, that “nitric acid is nothing else
than nitrous air, combined with almost its own
volume of the purest part of atmospheric air, and
a considerable quantity of water.”

Lavoisier supposed that the stages in the
complete reaction between mercury and nitric acid
were these: the withdrawal of oxygen from the
acid by the mercury, and the union of the compound
of mercury and oxygen thus formed with
the constituents of the acid which remained when
part of its oxygen was taken away. The removal
of oxygen from nitric acid by the mercury produced
nitrous air; when the product of the union
of the oxide of mercury and the nitric acid
deprived of part of its oxygen was heated, more
nitrous air was given off, and oxide of mercury
remained, and was decomposed, at a higher
temperature, into mercury and oxygen.

Lavoisier thought of these reactions as the
tearing asunder, by mercury, of nitric acid into
definite quantities of its three components, themselves
distinct substances, nitrous air, water, and
oxygen; and the combination of the mercury
with a certain measurable quantity of one of
these components, namely, oxygen, followed by
the union of this compound of mercury and
oxygen with what remained of the components
of nitric acid.

Lavoisier had formed a clear, consistent, and
suggestive mental picture of chemical changes.
He thought of a chemical reaction as always the
same under the same conditions, as an action
between a fixed and measurable quantity of one
substance, having definite and definable properties,
with fixed and measurable quantities of
other substances, the properties of each of which
were definite and definable.

Lavoisier also recognised that certain definite
substances could be divided into things simpler
than themselves, but that other substances refused
to undergo simplification by division into two or
more unlike portions. He spoke of the object of
chemistry as follows:—⁸ “In submitting to experiments
the different substances found in nature,
chemistry seeks to decompose these substances,
and to get them into such conditions that their
various components may be examined separately.
Chemistry advances to its end by dividing, sub-dividing,
and again sub-dividing, and we do not
know what will be the limits of such operations.
We cannot be certain that what we regard as
simple to-day is indeed simple; all we can say is,
that such a substance is the actual term whereat
chemical analysis has arrived, and that with our
present knowledge we cannot sub-divide it.”

In these words Lavoisier defines the chemical
conception of elements; since his time an element
is “the actual term whereat chemical analysis
has arrived,” it is that which “with our present
knowledge we cannot sub-divide”; and, as a
working hypothesis, the notion of element has no
wider meaning than this. I have already quoted
Boyle’s statement that by elements he meant
“certain primitive and simple bodies … not
made of any other bodies, or of one another.”
Boyle was still slightly restrained by the alchemical
atmosphere around him; he was still inclined to
say, “this must be the way nature works, she
must begin with certain substances which are
absolutely simple.” Lavoisier had thrown off all
the trammels which hindered the alchemists from
making rigorous experimental investigations. If
one may judge from his writings, he had not
struggled to free himself from these trammels,
he had not slowly emerged from the quagmires
of alchemy, and painfully gained firmer ground;
the extraordinary clearness and directness of his
mental vision had led him straight to the very
heart of the problems of chemistry, and enabled
him not only calmly to ignore all the machinery
of Elements, Principles, Essences, and the like,
which the alchemists had constructed so laboriously,
but also to construct, in place of that
mechanism which hindered inquiry, genuine
scientific hypotheses which directed inquiry,
and were themselves altered by the results of the
experiments they had suggested.

Lavoisier made these great advances by applying
himself to the minute and exhaustive examination
of a few cases of chemical change, and
endeavouring to account for everything which
took part in the processes he studied, by weighing
or measuring each distinct substance which was
present when the change began, and each which
was present when the change was finished. He
did not make haphazard experiments; he had a
method, a system; he used hypotheses, and he used
them rightly. “Systems in physics,” Lavoisier
writes, “are but the proper instruments for helping
the feebleness of our senses. Properly speaking,
they are methods of approximation which put us
on the track of solving problems; they are the
hypotheses which, successively modified, corrected,
and changed, by experience, ought to conduct
us, some day, by the method of exclusions and
eliminations, to the knowledge of the true laws
of nature.”

In a memoir wherein he is considering the
production of carbonic acid and alcohol by the
fermentation of fruit-juice, Lavoisier says, “It is
evident that we must know the nature and composition
of the substances which can be fermented
and the products of fermentation; for nothing is
created, either in the operations of art or in those
of nature; and it may be laid down that the
quantity of material present at the beginning of
every operation is the same as the quantity
present at the end, that the quality and quantity
of the principles⁹ are the same, and that nothing
happens save certain changes, certain modifications.
On this principle is based the whole art
of experimenting in chemistry; in all chemical
experiments we must suppose that there is a true
equality between the principles¹⁰ of the substances
which are examined and those which are obtained
from them by analysis.”

If Lavoisier’s memoirs are examined closely, it
is seen that at the very beginning of his chemical
inquiries he assumed the accuracy, and the
universal application, of the generalisation
“nothing is created, either in the operations of
art or in those of nature.” Naturalists had been
feeling their way for centuries towards such a
generalisation as this; it had been in the air for
many generations; sometimes it was almost
realised by this or that investigator, then it
escaped for long periods. Lavoisier seems to
have realised, by what we call intuition, that
however great and astonishing may be the
changes in the properties of the substances
which mutually react, there is no change in the
total quantity of material.

Not only did Lavoisier realise and act on this
principle, he also measured quantities of substances
by the one practical method, namely, by
weighing; and by doing this he showed chemists
the only road along which they could advance
towards a genuine knowledge of material changes.

The generalisation expressed by Lavoisier in
the words I have quoted is now known as the
law of the conservation of mass; it is generally
stated in some such form as this:—the sum of the
masses of all the homogeneous substances
which take part in a chemical (or physical)
change does not itself change. The science of
chemistry rests on this law; every quantitative
analysis assumes the accuracy, and is a proof of
the validity, of it.¹¹

By accepting the accuracy of this generalisation,
and using it in every experiment, Lavoisier
was able to form a clear mental picture of a
chemical change as the separation and combination
of homogeneous substances; for, by using
the balance, he was able to follow each substance
through the maze of changes, to determine when it
united with other substances, and when it
separated into substances simpler than itself.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS CONTRASTED WITH
THE ALCHEMICAL PRINCIPLES.

It was known to many observers in the later
years of the 17th century that the product of
the calcination of a metal weighs more than the
metal; but it was still possible, at that time, to
assert that this fact is of no importance to one
who is seeking to give an accurate description
of the process of calcination. Weight, which
measures mass or quantity of substance, was
thought of, in these days, as a property like
colour, taste, or smell, a property which was
sometimes decreased, and sometimes increased,
by adding one substance to another. Students
of natural occurrences were, however, feeling
their way towards the recognition of some property
of substances which did not change in the
haphazard way wherein most properties seemed to
alter. Lavoisier reached this property at one
bound. By his experimental investigations, he
taught that, however greatly the properties of one
substance may be masked, or altered, by adding
another substance to it, yet the property we call
mass, and measure by weight, is not affected by
these changes; for Lavoisier showed, that the mass
of the product of the union of two substances is
always exactly the sum of the masses of these
two substances, and the sum of the masses of the
substances whereinto one substance is divided is
always exactly equal to that mass of the substance
which is divided.

For the undefined, ever-changing, protean
essence, or soul, of a thing which the alchemists
thought of as hidden by wrappings of properties,
the exact investigations of Lavoisier, and those of
others who worked on the same lines as he, substituted
this definite, fixed, unmodifiable property
of mass. Lavoisier, and those who followed in
his footsteps, also did away with the alchemical
notion of the existence of an essential substratum,
independent of changes in those properties
of a substance which can be observed by the
senses. For the experimental researches of these
men obliged naturalists to recognise, that a change
in the properties of a definite, homogeneous substance,
such as pure water, pure chalk, or pure
sulphur, is accompanied (or, as we generally say,
is caused) by the formation of a new substance or
substances; and this formation, this apparent
creation, of new material, is effected, either by
the addition of something to the original substance,
or by the separation of it into portions
which are unlike it, and unlike one another. If
the change is a combination, or coalescence, of
two things into one, then the mass, and hence the
weight, of the product is equal to the sum of
those masses, and hence those weights, of the
things which have united to form it; if the
change is a separation of one distinct substance
into several substances, then the sum of the
masses, and hence the weights, of the products is
equal to that mass, and hence that weight, of the
substance which has been separated.

Consider the word water, and the substance
represented by this word. In Chapter IV., I gave
illustrations of the different meanings which have
been given to this word; it is sometimes used
to represent a material substance, sometimes a
quality more or less characteristic of that substance,
and sometimes a process to which that substance,
and many others like it, may be subjected. But
when the word water is used with a definite
and exact meaning, it is a succinct expression for
a certain group, or collocation, of measurable
properties which are always found together, and
is, therefore, thought of as a distinct substance.
This substance can be separated into two other
substances very unlike it, and can be formed by
causing these to unite. One hundred parts, by
weight, of pure water are always formed by the
union of 11.11 parts of hydrogen, and 88.89
parts of oxygen, and can be separated into these
quantities of those substances. When water is
formed by the union of hydrogen and oxygen, in
the ratio of 11.11 parts by weight of the former
to 88.89 of the latter, the properties of the two
substances which coalesce to form it disappear,
except their masses. It is customary to say that
water contains hydrogen and oxygen; but this
expression is scarcely an accurate description of
the facts. What we call substances are known
to us only by their properties, that is, the ways
wherein they act on our senses. Hydrogen has
certain definite properties, oxygen has other
definite properties, and the properties of water
are perfectly distinct from those of either of the
substances which it is said to contain. It is,
therefore, somewhat misleading to say that water
contains substances the properties whereof, except
their masses, disappeared at the moment when
they united and water was produced. Nevertheless
we are forced to think of water as, in a
sense, containing hydrogen and oxygen. For,
one of the properties of hydrogen is its power to
coalesce, or combine, with oxygen to form water,
and one of the properties of oxygen is its ability
to unite with hydrogen to form water; and these
properties of those substances cannot be recognised,
or even suspected, unless certain definite
quantities of the two substances are brought
together under certain definite conditions. The
properties which characterise hydrogen, and
those which characterise oxygen, when these
things are separated from all other substances,
can be determined and measured in terms of the
similar properties of some other substance taken
as a standard. These two distinct substances
disappear when they are brought into contact,
under the proper conditions, and something
(water) is obtained whose properties are very
unlike those of hydrogen or oxygen; this new
thing can be caused to disappear, and hydrogen
and oxygen are again produced. This
cycle of changes can be repeated as often
as we please; the quantities of hydrogen and
oxygen which are obtained when we choose
to stop the process are exactly the same as
the quantities of those substances which disappeared
in the first operation whereby water
was produced. Hence, water is an intimate union
of hydrogen and oxygen; and, in this sense,
water may be said to contain hydrogen and
oxygen.

The alchemist would have said, the properties
of hydrogen and oxygen are destroyed when
these things unite to form water, but the essence,
or substratum, of each remains. The chemist says,
you cannot discover all the properties of hydrogen
and oxygen by examining these substances
apart from one another, for one of the most
important properties of either is manifested only
when the two mutually react: the formation of
water is not the destruction of the properties of
hydrogen and oxygen and the revelation of their
essential substrata, it is rather the manifestation
of a property of each which cannot be discovered
except by causing the union of both.

There was, then, a certain degree of accuracy
in the alchemical description of the processes
we now call chemical changes, as being the removal
of the outer properties of the things which react,
and the manifestation of their essential substance.
But there is a vast difference between this description
and the chemical presentment of these
processes as reactions between definite and
measurable quantities of elements, or compounds, or
both, resulting in the re-distribution, of the
elements, or the separation of the compounds into
their elements, and the formation of new compounds
by the re-combination of these elements.

Let us contrast the two descriptions somewhat
more fully.

The alchemist wished to effect the transmutation
of one substance into another; he despaired
of the possibility of separating the Elements
whereof the substance might be formed, but he
thought he could manipulate what he called the
virtues of the Elements by a judicious use of some
or all of the three Principles, which he named
Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury. He could not state
in definite language what he meant by these
Principles; they were states, conditions, or qualities,
of classes of substances, which could not be
defined. The directions the alchemist was able
to give to those who sought to effect the change
of one thing into another were these. Firstly,
to remove those properties which characterised
the thing to be changed, and leave only the
properties which it shared with other things like
it; secondly, to destroy the properties which the
thing to be changed possessed in common with
certain other things; thirdly, to commingle the
Essence of the thing with the Essence of something
else, in due proportion and under proper conditions;
and, finally, to hope for the best, keep
a clear head, and maintain a sense of virtue.

If he who was about to attempt the transmutation
inquired how he was to destroy the specific
properties, and the class properties, of the thing
he proposed to change, and by what methods he
was to obtain its Essence, and cause that Essence
to produce the new thing, he would be told to
travel along “the road which was followed by
the Great Architect of the Universe in the
creation of the world.” And if he demanded
more detailed directions, he would be informed
that the substance wherewith his experiments
began must first be mortified, then dissolved,
then conjoined, then putrefied, then congealed,
then cibated, then sublimed, and fermented, and,
finally, exalted. He would, moreover, be warned
that in all these operations he must use, not
things which he could touch, handle, and weigh,
but the virtues, the lives, the souls, of such things.

When the student of chemistry desires to effect
the transformation of one definite substance into
another, he is told to determine, by quantitative
experiments, what are the elements, and what
the quantities of these elements, which compose
the compound which he proposes to change, and
the compound into which he proposes to change
it; and he is given working definitions of the
words element and compound. If the compound
he desires to produce is found to be composed of
elements different from those which form the
compound wherewith his operations begin, he is
directed to bring about a reaction, or a series of
reactions, between the compound which is to be
changed, and some other collocation of elements
the composition of which is known to be such
that it can supply the new elements which are
needed for the production of the new compound.

Since Lavoisier realised, for himself, and those
who were to come after him, the meaning of the
terms element and compound, we may say that
chemists have been able to form a mental picture
of the change from one definite substance to
another, which is clear, suggestive, and consistent,
because it is an approximately accurate description
of the facts discovered by careful and penetrative
investigations. This presentment of the
change has been substituted for the alchemical
conception, which was an attempt to express
what introspection and reasoning on the results
of superficial investigations, guided by specious
analogies, suggested ought to be the facts.

Lavoisier was the man who made possible the
more accurate, and more far-reaching, description
of the changes which result in the production of
substances very unlike those which are changed;
and he did this by experimentally analysing the
conceptions of the element and the compound,
giving definite and workable meanings to these
conceptions, and establishing, on an experimental
foundation, the generalisation that the sum of the
quantities of the substances which take part in
any change is itself unchanged.

A chemical element was thought of by Lavoisier
as “the actual term whereat analysis has arrived,”
a definite substance “which we cannot subdivide
with our present knowledge,” but not necessarily
a substance which will never be divided. A
compound was thought of by him as a definite
substance which is always produced by the union
of the same quantities of the same elements, and
can be separated into the same quantities of the
same elements.

These conceptions were amplified and made
more full of meaning by the work of many who
came after Lavoisier, notably by John Dalton,
who was born in 1766 and died in 1844.

In Chapter I., I gave a sketch of the atomic
theory of the Greek thinkers. The founder of
that theory, who flourished about 500 B.C., said
that every substance is a collocation of a vast
number of minute particles, which are unchangeable,
indestructible, and impenetrable, and are
therefore properly called atoms; that the differences
which are observed between the qualities
of things are due to differences in the numbers,
sizes, shapes, positions, and movements of atoms,
and that the process which occurs when one substance
is apparently destroyed and another is
produced in its place, is nothing more than a
rearrangement of atoms.

The supposition that changes in the properties
of substances are connected with changes in
the numbers, movements, and arrangements of different
kinds of minute particles, was used in a
general way by many naturalists of the 17th and
18th centuries; but Dalton was the first to show
that the data obtained by the analyses of compounds
make it possible to determine the relative
weights of the atoms of the elements.

Dalton used the word atom to denote the
smallest particle of an element, or a compound,
which exhibits the properties characteristic of
that element or compound. He supposed that
the atoms of an element are never divided in
any of the reactions of that element, but the
atoms of a compound are often separated into
the atoms of the elements whereof the compound
is composed. Apparently without knowing that
the supposition had been made more than two
thousand years before his time, Dalton was led
by his study of the composition and properties
of the atmosphere to assume that the atoms of
different substances, whether elements or compounds,
are of different sizes and have different
weights. He assumed that when two elements
unite to form only one compound, the atom of
that compound has the simplest possible composition,
is formed by the union of a single atom
of each element. Dalton knew only one compound
of hydrogen and nitrogen, namely, ammonia.
Analyses of this compound show that it
is composed of one part by weight of hydrogen
and 4.66 parts by weight of nitrogen. Dalton
said one atom of hydrogen combines with one
atom of nitrogen to form an atom of ammonia;
hence an atom of nitrogen is 4.66 times heavier
than an atom of hydrogen; in other words, if
the atomic weight of hydrogen is taken as unity,
the atomic weight of nitrogen is expressed by the
number 4.66. Dalton referred the atomic weights
of the elements to the atomic weight of hydrogen
as unity, because hydrogen is lighter than any
other substance; hence the numbers which tell
how much heavier the atoms of the elements are
than an atom of hydrogen are always greater
than one, are always positive numbers.

When two elements unite in different proportions,
by weight, to form more than one compound,
Dalton supposed that (in most cases at
any rate) one of the compounds is formed by the
union of a single atom of each element; the next
compound is formed by the union of one atom of
the element which is present in smaller quantity
with two, three, or more, atoms of the other
element, and the next compound is formed by
the union of one atom of the first element with
a larger number (always, necessarily, a whole
number) of atoms of the other element than is
contained in the second compound; and so on.
From this assumption, and the Daltonian conception
of the atom, it follows that the quantities by
weight of one element which are found to unite
with one and the same weight of another element
must always be expressible as whole multiples of
one number. For if two elements, A and B, form
a compound, that compound is formed, by supposition,
of one atom of A and one atom of B;
if more of B is added, at least one atom of B
must be added; however much of B is added the
quantity must be a whole number of atoms; and
as every atom of B is the same in all respects as
every other atom of B, the weights of B added to
a constant weight of A must be whole multiples
of the atomic weight of B.

The facts which were available in Dalton’s
time confirmed this deduction from the atomic
theory within the limits of experimental errors;
and the facts which have been established since
Dalton’s time are completely in keeping with the
deduction. Take, for instance, three compounds
of the elements nitrogen and oxygen. That one
of the three which contains least oxygen is composed
of 63.64 per cent. of nitrogen, and 36.36
per cent. of oxygen; if the atomic weight of
nitrogen is taken to be 4.66, which is the weight
of nitrogen that combines with one part by
weight of hydrogen, then the weight of oxygen
combined with 4.66 of nitrogen is 2.66 (63.64:36.36 = 4.66:2.66).
The weights of oxygen
which combine with 4.66 parts by weight of
nitrogen to form the second and third compounds,
respectively, must be whole multiples of 2.66;
these weights are 5.32 and 10.64. Now 5.32 =
2.66 x 2, and 10.64 = 2.66 x 4. Hence, the
quantities by weight of oxygen which combine
with one and the same weight of nitrogen are
such that two of these quantities are whole
multiples of the third quantity.

Dalton’s application of the Greek atomic
theory to the facts established by the analyses
of compounds enabled him to attach to each
element a number which he called the atomic
weight of the element, and to summarise all the
facts concerning the compositions of compounds
in the statement, that the elements combine
in the ratios of their atomic weights, or in the
ratios of whole multiples of their atomic weights.
All the investigations which have been made
into the compositions of compounds, since
Dalton’s time, have confirmed the generalisation
which followed from Dalton’s application of the
atomic theory.

Even if the theory of atoms were abandoned,
the generalisation would remain, as an accurate
and exact statement of facts which hold good in
every chemical change, that a number can be
attached to each element, and the weights of the
elements which combine are in the ratios of these
numbers, or whole multiples of these numbers.

Since chemists realised the meaning of Dalton’s
book, published in 1808, and entitled, A New
System of Chemical Philosophy, elements have been
regarded as distinct and definite substances,
which have not been divided into parts different
from themselves, and unite with each other in
definite quantities by weight which can be
accurately expressed as whole multiples of
certain fixed quantities; and compounds have
been regarded as distinct and definite substances
which are formed by the union of, and can be
separated into, quantities of various elements
which are expressible by certain fixed numbers
or whole multiples thereof. These descriptions
of elements and compounds are expressions of
actual facts. They enable chemists to state the
compositions of all the compounds which are, or
can be, formed by the union of any elements. For
example, let A, B, C, and D represent four
elements, and also certain definite weights of
these elements, then the compositions of all the
compounds which can be formed by the union of
these elements are expressed by the scheme
A_n B_m C_p D_q, where m n p and q are whole
numbers.

These descriptions of elements and compounds
also enable chemists to form a clear picture to
themselves of any chemical change. They think
of a chemical change as being; (1) a union of
those weights of two, or more, elements which
are expressed by the numbers attached to these
elements, or by whole multiples of these numbers;
or (2) a union of such weights of two, or
more, compounds as can be expressed by certain
numbers or by whole multiples of these numbers;
or (3) a reaction between elements and compounds,
or between compounds and compounds, resulting
in the redistribution of the elements concerned,
in such a way that the complete change of composition
can be expressed by using the numbers,
or whole multiples of the numbers, attached to
the elements.

How different is this conception of a change
wherein substances are formed, entirely unlike
those things which react to form them, from the
alchemical presentment of such a process! The
alchemist spoke of stripping off the outer properties
of the thing to be changed, and, by operating
spiritually on the soul which was thus laid bare,
inducing the essential virtue of the substance to
exhibit its powers of transmutation. But he was
unable to give definite meanings to the expressions
which he used, he was unable to think
clearly about the transformations which he tried to
accomplish. The chemist discards the machinery
of virtues, souls, and powers. It is true that he
substitutes a machinery of minute particles; but
this machinery is merely a means of thinking
clearly and consistently about the changes which
he studies. The alchemist thought, vaguely, of
substance as something underlying, and independent
of, properties; the chemist uses the
expression, this or that substance, as a convenient
way of presenting and reasoning about certain groups
of properties. It seems to me that if we
think of matter as something more than properties
recognised by the senses, we are going back on
the road which leads to the confusion of the
alchemical times.

The alchemists expressed their conceptions in
what seems to us a crude, inconsistent, and very
undescriptive language. Chemists use a language
which is certainly symbolical, but also intelligible,
and on the whole fairly descriptive of the facts.

A name is given to each elementary substance,
that is, each substance which has not been decomposed;
the name generally expresses some
characteristic property of the substance, or tells
something about its origin or the place of its
discovery. The names of compounds are formed
by putting together the names of the elements
which combine to produce them; and the relative
quantities of these elements are indicated either
by the use of Latin or Greek prefixes, or by
variations in the terminal syllables of the names
of the elements.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE MODERN FORM OF THE ALCHEMICAL QUEST
OF THE ONE THING.

The study of the properties of the elements
shows that these substances fall into groups, the
members of each of which are like one another,
and form compounds which are similar. The
examination of the properties and compositions
of compounds has shown that similarity of properties
is always accompanied by similarity of
composition. Hence, the fact that certain elements
are very closely allied in their properties
suggests that these elements may also be allied
in their composition. Now, to speak of the composition
of an element is to think of the element
as formed by the union of at least two different
substances; it implies the supposition that some
elements at any rate are really compounds.

The fact that there is a very definite connexion
between the values of the atomic weights,
and the properties, of the elements, lends some
support to the hypothesis that the substances we
call, and are obliged at present to call, elements,
may have been formed from one, or a few, distinct
substances, by some process of progressive
change. If the elements are considered in the
order of increasing atomic weights, from hydrogen,
whose atomic weight is taken as unity because it
is the lightest substance known, to uranium, an
atom of which is 240 times heavier than an atom
of hydrogen, it is found that the elements fall
into periods, and the properties of those in one
period vary from element to element, in a way
which is, broadly and on the whole, like the
variation of the properties of those in other
periods. This fact suggests the supposition—it
might be more accurate to say the speculation—that
the elements mark the stable points in a
process of change, which has not proceeded continuously
from a very simple substance to a very
complex one, but has repeated itself, with certain
variations, again and again. If such a process
has occurred, we might reasonably expect to find
substances exhibiting only minute differences in
their properties, differences so slight as to make
it impossible to assign the substances, definitely
and certainly, either to the class of elements or
to that of compounds. We find exactly such
substances among what are called the rare earths.
There are earth-like substances which exhibit no
differences of chemical properties, and yet show
minute differences in the characters of the light
which they emit when they are raised to a very
high temperature.

The results of analysis by the spectroscope of
the light emitted by certain elements at different
temperatures may be reasonably interpreted by
supposing that these elements are separated
into simpler substances by the action on them of very
large quantities of thermal energy. The spectrum
of the light emitted by glowing iron heated by a
Bunsen flame (say, at 1200° C. = about 2200° F.)
shows a few lines and flutings; when iron is
heated in an electric arc (say, to 3500° C. = about
6300° F.) the spectrum shows some two thousand
lines; at the higher temperature produced by
the electric spark-discharge, the spectrum shows
only a few lines. As a guide to further investigation,
we may provisionally infer from these
facts that iron is changed at very high temperatures
into substances simpler than itself.

Sir Norman Lockyer’s study of the spectra of
the light from stars has shown that the light from
those stars which are presumably the hottest,
judging by the general character of their spectra,
reveals the presence of a very small number of
chemical elements; and that the number of
spectral lines, and, therefore, the number of
elements, increases as we pass from the hottest
to cooler stars. At each stage of the change
from the hottest to cooler stars certain substances
disappear and certain other substances take their
places. It may be supposed, as a suggestive
hypothesis, that the lowering of stellar temperature
is accompanied by the formation, from simpler
forms of matter, of such elements as iron, calcium,
manganese, and other metals.

In the year 1896, the French chemist Becquerel
discovered the fact that salts of the metal uranium,
the atomic weight of which is 240, and is greater
than that of any other element, emit rays which
cause electrified bodies to lose their electric
charges, and act on photographic plates that are
wrapped in sheets of black paper, or in thin
sheets of other substances which stop rays of
light. The radio-activity of salts of uranium was
proved not to be increased or diminished when
these salts had been shielded for five years
from the action of light by keeping them in
leaden boxes. Shortly after Becquerel’s discovery,
experiments proved that salts of the rare
metal thorium are radio-active. This discovery
was followed by Madame Curie’s demonstration
of the fact that certain specimens of pitchblende,
a mineral which contains compounds of uranium
and of many other metals, are extremely radio-active,
and by the separation from pitchblende,
by Monsieur and Madame Curie, of new substances
much more radio-active than compounds
of uranium or of thorium. The new substances
were proved to be compounds chemically very
similar to salts of barium. Their compositions
were determined on the supposition that they
were salts of an unknown metal closely allied to
barium. Because of the great radio-activity of
the compounds, the hypothetical metal of them
was named Radium. At a later time, radium
was isolated by Madame Curie. It is described
by her as a white, hard, metal-like solid, which
reacts with water at the ordinary temperature,
as barium does.

Since the discovery of radium compounds,
many radio-active substances have been isolated.
Only exceedingly minute quantities of any of
them have been obtained. The quantities of
substances used in experiments on radio-activity
are so small that they escape the ordinary methods
of measurement, and are scarcely amenable to the
ordinary processes of the chemical laboratory.
Fortunately, radio-activity can be detected and
measured by electrical methods of extraordinary
fineness, methods the delicacy of which very
much more exceeds that of spectroscopic methods
than the sensitiveness of these surpasses that of
ordinary chemical analysis.

At the time of the discovery of radio-activity,
about seventy-five substances were called elements;
in other words, about seventy-five different
substances were known to chemists, none
of which had been separated into unlike parts,
none of which had been made by the coalescence
of unlike substances. Compounds of only two
of these substances, uranium and thorium, are
radio-active. Radio-activity is a very remarkable
phenomenon. So far as we know at present,
radio-activity is not a property of the substances
which form almost the whole of the rocks, the
waters, and the atmosphere of the earth; it is
not a property of the materials which constitute
living organisms. It is a property of some
thirty substances—of course, the number may
be increased—a few of which are found widely
distributed in rocks and waters, but none of
which is found anywhere except in extraordinarily
minute quantity. Radium is the most abundant
of these substances; but only a very few grains
of radium chloride can be obtained from a couple
of tons of pitchblende.

In Chapter X. of The Story of the Chemical
Elements I have given a short account of the
outstanding phenomena of radio-activity; for the
present purpose it will suffice to state a few
facts of fundamental importance.

Radio-active substances are stores of energy,
some of which is constantly escaping from them;
they are constantly changing without external
compulsion, and are constantly radiating energy:
all explosives are storehouses of energy which,
or part of which, can be obtained from them;
but the liberation of their energy must be started
by some kind of external shock. When an explosive
substance has exploded, its existence as
an explosive is finished; the products of the
explosion are substances from which energy
cannot be obtained: when a radio-active substance
has exploded, it explodes again, and again,
and again; a time comes, sooner or later, when
it has changed into substances that are useless
as sources of energy. The disintegration of an
explosive, started by an external force, is generally
completed in a fraction of a second; change
of condition changes the rate of explosion: the
“half-life period” of each radio-active substance
is a constant characteristic of it; if a gram of
radium were kept for about 1800 years, half of it
would have changed into radio-inactive substances.
Conditions may be arranged so that an
explosive remains unchanged—wet gun-cotton is
not exploded by a shock which would start the
explosion of dry gun-cotton—in other words, the
explosion of an explosive can be regulated: the
explosive changes of a radio-active substance,
which are accompanied by the radiation of energy,
cannot be regulated; they proceed spontaneously
in a regular and definable manner which is not
influenced by any external conditions—such as
great change of temperature, presence or absence
of other substances—so far as these conditions
have been made the subject of experiment:
the amount of activity of a radio-active substance
has not been increased or diminished by any
process to which the substance has been subjected.
Explosives are manufactured articles;
explosiveness is a property of certain arrangements
of certain quantities of certain elements:
so far as experiments have gone, it has not been
found possible to add the property of radio-activity
to an inactive substance, or to remove the property
of radio-activity from an active substance;
the cessation of the radio-activity of an active
substance is accompanied by the disappearance
of the substance, and the production of inactive
bodies altogether unlike the original active body.

Radio-active substances are constantly giving
off energy in the form of heat, sending forth rays
which have definite and remarkable properties,
and producing gaseous emanations which are very
unstable, and change, some very rapidly, some
less rapidly, into other substances, and emit rays
which are generally the same as the rays emitted
by the parent substance. In briefly considering
these three phenomena, I shall choose radium
compounds as representative of the class of
radio-active substances.

Radium compounds spontaneously give off
energy in the form of heat. A quantity of
radium chloride which contains 1 gram of radium
continuously gives out, per hour, a quantity of
heat sufficient to raise the temperature of 1 gram
of water through 100° C., or 100 grams of water
through 1° C. The heat given out by 1 gram of
radium during twenty-four hours would raise the
temperature of 2400 grams of water through
1° C.; in one year the temperature of 876,000
grams of water would be raised through 1° C.;
and in 1800 years, which is approximately the
half-life period of radium, the temperature of
1,576,800 kilograms of water would be raised
through 1° C. These results may be expressed
by saying that if 1 gram (about 15 grains) of
radium were kept until half of it had changed
into inactive substances, and if the heat spontaneously
produced during the changes which
occurred were caused to act on water, that quantity
of heat would raise the temperature of about
15½ tons of water from its freezing- to its boiling-point.

Radium compounds send forth three kinds of
rays, distinguished as alpha, beta, and gamma
rays. Experiments have made it extremely
probable that the α-rays are streams of very
minute particles, somewhat heavier than atoms
of hydrogen, moving at the rate of about 18,000
miles per second; and that the β-rays are streams
of much more minute particles, the mass of each
of which is about one one-thousandth of the mass
of an atom of hydrogen, moving about ten times
more rapidly than the α-particles, that is, moving
at the rate of about 180,000 miles per second.
The γ-rays are probably pulsations of the ether,
the medium supposed to fill space. The emission
of α-rays by radium is accompanied by the production
of the inert elementary gas, helium;
therefore, the α-rays are, or quickly change into,
rapidly moving particles of helium. The particles
which constitute the β-rays carry electric charges;
these electrified particles, each approximately a
thousand times lighter than an atom of hydrogen,
moving nearly as rapidly as the pulsations of the
ether which we call light, are named electrons.
The rays from radium compounds discharge
electrified bodies, ionise gases, that is, cause
them to conduct electricity, act on photographic
plates, and produce profound changes in living
organisms.

The radium emanation is a gas about 111
times heavier than hydrogen; to this gas
Sir William Ramsay has given the name niton.
The gas has been condensed to a colourless
liquid, and frozen to an opaque solid which glows
like a minute arc-light. Radium emanation gives
off α-particles, that is, very rapidly moving
atoms of helium, and deposits exceedingly minute
quantities of a solid, radio-active substance
known as radium A. The change of the emanation
into helium and radium A proceeds fairly
rapidly: the half-life period of the emanation is
a little less than four days. This change is
attended by the liberation of much energy.

The only satisfactory mental picture which
the facts allow us to form, at present, of the
emission of β-rays from radium compounds is
that which represents these rays as streams of
electrons, that is, particles, each about a thousand
times lighter than an atom of hydrogen, each
carrying an electric charge, and moving at the
rate of about 180,000 miles per second, that is,
nearly as rapidly as light. When an electric
discharge is passed from a plate of metal, arranged
as the kathode, to a metallic wire arranged
as the anode, both sealed through the walls of a
glass tube or bulb from which almost the whole
of the air has been extracted, rays proceed from
the kathode, in a direction at right angles thereto,
and, striking the glass in the neighbourhood
of the anode, produce a green phosphorescence.
Facts have been gradually accumulated which
force us to think of these kathode rays as streams
of very rapidly moving electrons, that is, as
streams of extraordinarily minute electrically
charged particles identical with the particles
which form the β-rays emitted by compounds
of radium.

The phenomena of radio-activity, and also the
phenomena of the kathode rays, have obliged
us to refine our machinery of minute particles
by including therein particles at least a
thousand times lighter than atoms of hydrogen.
The term electron was suggested, a good many
years ago, by Dr Johnstone Stoney, for the unit
charge of electricity which is carried by an atom
of hydrogen when hydrogen atoms move in a
liquid or gas under the directing influence of the
electric current. Some chemists speak of the
electrons, which are the β-rays from radium, and
the kathode rays produced in almost vacuous
tubes, as non-material particles of electricity.
Non-material means devoid of mass. The method
by which approximate determinations have been
made of the charges on electrons consists in
measuring the ratio between the charges and the
masses of these particles. If the results of the
determinations are accepted, electrons are not
devoid of mass. Electrons must be thought of as
material particles differing from other minute
material particles in the extraordinary smallness
of their masses, in the identity of their properties,
including their mass, in their always carrying
electric charges, and in the vast velocity of their
motion. We must think of an electron either as
a unit charge of electricity one property of which
is its minute mass, or as a material particle
having an extremely small mass and carrying a
unit charge of electricity: the two mental pictures
are almost, if not quite, identical.

Electrons are produced by sending an electric
discharge through a glass bulb containing a
minute quantity of air or other gas, using
metallic plates or wires as kathode and anode.
Experiments have shown that the electrons are
identical in all their properties, whatever metal
is used to form the kathode and anode, and of
whatever gas there is a minute quantity in the
bulb. The conclusion must be drawn that
identical electrons are constituents of, or are
produced from, very different kinds of chemical
elements. As the facts about kathode rays, and
the facts of radio-activity are (at present) inexplicable
except on the supposition that these
phenomena are exhibited by particles of extraordinary
minuteness, and as the smallest particles
with which chemists are concerned in their everyday
work are the atoms of the elements, we seem
obliged to think of many kinds of atoms as structures,
not as homogeneous bodies. We seem
obliged to think of atoms as very minute material
particles, which either normally are, or under
definite conditions may be, associated with electrically
charged particles very much lighter than
themselves, all of which are identical, whatever
be the atoms with which they are associated or
from which they are produced.

In their study of different kinds of matter,
chemists have found it very helpful to place in
one class those substances which they have not
been able to separate into unlike parts. They
have distinguished this class of substances from
other substances, and have named them elements.
The expression chemical elements is merely a
summary of certain observed facts. For many
centuries chemists have worked with a conceptual
machinery based on the notion that matter
has a grained structure. For more than a
hundred years they have been accustomed to
think of atoms as the ultimate particles with
which they have had to deal. Working with
this order-producing instrument, they have regarded
the properties of elements as properties
of the atoms, or of groups of a few of the atoms,
of these substances. That they might think
clearly and suggestively about the properties of
elements, and connect these with other chemical
facts, they have translated the language of sense-perceptions
into the language of thought, and,
for properties of those substances which have not been
decomposed, have used the more fertile expression
atomic properties. When a chemist thinks of an
atom, he thinks of the minutest particle of one
of the substances which have the class-mark have-not-been-decomposed,
and the class-name element.
The chemist does not call these substances
elements because he has been forced to regard
the minute particles of them as undivided, much
less because he thinks of these particles as indivisible;
his mental picture of their structure
as an atomic structure formed itself from the
fact that they had not been decomposed. The
formation of the class element followed necessarily
from observed facts, and has been justified by
the usefulness of it as an instrument for forwarding
accurate knowledge. The conception of the
elementary atom as a particle which had not
been decomposed followed from many observed
facts besides those concerning elements, and has
been justified by the usefulness of it as an instrument
for forwarding accurate knowledge. Investigations
proved radio-activity to be a property
of the very minute particles of certain
substances, and each radio-active substance to
have characteristic properties, among which were
certain of those that belong to elements, and to
some extent are characteristic of elements.
Evidently, the simplest way for a chemist to
think about radio-activity was to think of it as
an atomic property; hence, as atomic properties
had always been regarded, in the last analysis,
as properties of elements, it was natural to place
the radio-active substances in the class elements,
provided that one forgot for the time that these
substances have not the class-mark have-not-been-decomposed.

As the facts of radio-activity led to the conclusion
that some of the minute particles of radio-active
substances are constantly disintegrating,
and as these substances had been labelled elements,
it seemed probable, or at least possible, that the
other bodies which chemists have long called
elements are not true elements, but are merely
more stable collocations of particles than the substances
which are classed as compounds. As
compounds can be changed into certain other
compounds, although not into any other compounds,
a way seemed to be opening which might
lead to the transformation of some elements into
some other elements.

The probability that one element might be
changed into another was increased by the
demonstration of the connexions between
uranium and radium. The metal uranium has
been classed with the elements since it was
isolated in 1840. In 1896, Becquerel found that
compounds of uranium, and also the metal itself,
are radio-active. In the light of what is now
known about radio-activity, it is necessary to
suppose that some of the minute particles of
uranium emit particles lighter than themselves,
and change into some substance, or substances,
different from uranium; in other words, it is
necessary to suppose that some particles of
uranium are spontaneously disintegrating. This
supposition is confirmed by the fact, experimentally
proved, that uranium emits α-rays,
that is, atoms of helium, and produces a substance
known as uranium X. Uranium X is
itself radio-active; it emits β-rays, that is, it
gives off electrons. Inasmuch as all minerals
which contain compounds of uranium contain
compounds of radium also, it is probable that
radium is one of the disintegration-products of
uranium. The rate of decay of radium may be
roughly expressed by saying that, if a quantity
of radium were kept for ten thousand years, only
about one per cent. of the original quantity would
then remain unchanged. Even if it were assumed
that at a remote time the earth’s crust contained
considerable quantities of radium compounds, it
is certain that they would have completely disappeared
long ago, had not compounds of radium
been reproduced from other materials. Again,
the most likely hypothesis is that compounds of
radium are being produced from compounds of
uranium.

Uranium is a substance which, after being
rightly classed with the elements for more than
half a century, because it had not been separated
into unlike parts, must now be classed with
the radium-like substances which disintegrate spontaneously,
although it differs from other radio-active
substances in that its rate of change is
almost infinitively slower than that of any of
them, except thorium.¹² Thorium, a very rare
metal, is the second of the seventy-five or eighty
elements known when radio-activity was discovered,
which has been found to undergo spontaneous
disintegration with the emission of rays.
The rate of change of thorium is considerably
slower than that of uranium.¹³ None of the
other substances placed in the class of elements
is radio-active.

On p. 192 I said, that when the radio-active
substances had been labelled elements, the facts of
radio-activity led some chemists to the conclusion
that the other bodies which had for long been
called by this class-name, or at any rate some of
these bodies, are perhaps not true elements, but
are merely more stable collocations of particles
than the substances called compounds. It seems
to me that this reasoning rests on an unscientific
use of the term element; it rests on giving to that
class-name the meaning, substances asserted to be
undecomposable. A line of demarcation is drawn
between elements, meaning thereby forms of matter
said to be undecomposable but probably capable
of separation into unlike parts, and true elements,
meaning thereby groups of identical undecomposable
particles. If one names the radio-active
substances elements, one is placing in this class
substances which are specially characterised by a
property the direct opposite of that the possession
of which by other substances was the reason
for the formation of the class. To do this may
be ingenious; it is certainly not scientific.

Since the time of Lavoisier, since the last
decade of the eighteenth century, careful chemists
have meant by an element a substance which
has not been separated into unlike parts, and
they have not meant more than that. The term
element has been used by accurate thinkers as a
useful class-mark which connotes a property—the
property of not having been decomposed—common
to all substances placed in the class, and
differentiating them from all other substances.
Whenever chemists have thought of elements as
the ultimate kinds of matter with which the
physical world is constructed—and they have
occasionally so thought and written—they have
fallen into quagmires of confusion.

Of course, the elements may, some day, be
separated into unlike parts. The facts of radio-activity
certainly suggest some kind of inorganic
evolution. Whether the elements are decomposed
is to be determined by experimental
inquiry, remembering always that no number of
failures to simplify them will justify the assertion
that they cannot be simplified. Chemistry
neither asserts or denies the decomposability of
the elements. At present, we have to recognise
the existence of extremely small quantities,
widely distributed in rocks and waters, of some
thirty substances, the minute particles of which
are constantly emitting streams of more minute,
identical particles that carry with them very
large quantities of energy, all of which thirty
substances are characterised, and are differentiated
from all other classes of substances wherewith
chemistry is concerned, by their spontaneous mutability,
and each is characterised by its special rate
of change and by the nature of the products of
its mutations. We have now to think of the
minute particles of two of the seventy-five or
eighty substances which until the other day had
not been decomposed, and were therefore justly
called elements, as very slowly emitting streams
of minuter particles and producing characteristic
products of their disintegration. And we have
to think of some eighty substances as particular
kinds of matter, at present properly called
elements, because they are characterised, and
differentiated from all other substances, by the
fact that none of them has been separated into
unlike parts.

The study of radio-activity has introduced
into chemistry and physics a new order of
minute particles. Dalton made the atom a
beacon-light which revealed to chemists paths
that led them to wider and more accurate knowledge.
Avogadro illuminated chemical, and also
physical, ways by his conception of the molecule
as a stable, although separable, group of atoms
with particular properties different from those of
the atoms which constituted it. The work of
many investigators has made the old paths
clearer, and has shown to chemists and physicists
ways they had not seen before, by forcing them
to think of, and to make use of, a third kind of
material particles that are endowed with the
extraordinary property of radio-activity. Dalton
often said: “Thou knowest thou canst not cut
an atom”; but the fact that he applied the term
atom to the small particles of compounds proves
that he had escaped the danger of logically
defining the atom, the danger of thinking of it as
a particle which never can be cut. The molecule
of Avogadro has always been a decomposable
particle. The peculiarity of the new kind of particles,
the particles of radio-active bodies, is, not
that they can be separated into unlike parts
by the action of external forces, but that they
are constantly separating of their own accord
into unlike parts, and that their spontaneous
disintegration is accompanied by the production
of energy, the quantity of which is enormous
in comparison with the minuteness of the
material specks which are the carriers of it.

The continued study of the properties of the
minute particles of radio-active substances—a
new name is needed for those most mutable of
material grains—must lead to discoveries of
great moment for chemistry and physics. That
study has already thrown much light on the
phenomena of electric conductivity; it has
given us the electron, a particle at least a
thousand times lighter than an atom of hydrogen;
it has shown us that identical electrons are given
off by, or are separated from, different kinds of
elementary atoms, under definable conditions; it
has revealed unlooked-for sources of energy; it
has opened, and begun the elucidation of, a new
department of physical science; it has suggested
a new way of attacking the old problem of the
alchemists, the problem of the transmutation of the
elements.

The minute particles of two of the substances
for many years classed as elements give off
electrons; uranium and thorium are radio-active.
Electrons are produced by sending an electric
discharge through very small traces of different
gases, using electrodes of different metals. Electrons
are also produced by exposing various
metals to the action of ultra-violet light, and by
raising the temperature of various metals to
incandescence. Electrons are always identical,
whatever be their source. Three questions
suggest themselves. Can the atoms of all the
elements be caused to give off electrons? Are
electrons normal constituents of all elementary
atoms? Are elementary atoms collocations of
electrons? These questions are included in the
demand—Is it possible “to imagine a model
which has in it the potentiality of explaining”
radio-activity and other allied phenomena, as
well as all other chemical and physical properties
of elements and compounds? These questions
are answerable by experimental investigation,
and only by experimental investigation. If
experimental inquiry leads to affirmative answers
to the questions, we shall have to think of atoms
as structures of particles much lighter
than themselves; we shall have to think of the atoms
of all kinds of substances, however much the
substances differ chemically and physically, as
collocations of identical particles; we shall have
to think of the properties of atoms as conditioned,
in our final analysis, by the number and the
arrangement of their constitutive electrons.
Now, if a large probability were established in
favour of the view that different atoms are collocations
of different numbers of identical particles,
or of equal numbers of differently arranged
identical particles, we should have a guide which
might lead to methods whereby one collocation
of particles could be formed from another collocation
of the same particles, a guide which
might lead to methods whereby one element
could be transformed into another element.

To attempt “to imagine a model which has in
it the potentiality of explaining” radio-activity,
the production of kathode rays, and the other
chemical and physical properties of elements and
compounds, might indeed seem to be a hopeless
undertaking. A beginning has been made in the
mental construction of such a model by Professor
Sir J.J. Thomson. To attempt a description of
his reasoning and his results is beyond the scope
of this book.¹⁴

The facts that the emanation from radium
compounds spontaneously gives off very large
quantities of energy, and that the emanation
can easily be brought into contact with substances
on which it is desired to do work,
suggested to Sir William Ramsay that the
transformation of compounds of one element into
compounds of another element might possibly be
effected by enclosing a solution of a compound
along with radium emanation in a sealed tube,
and leaving the arrangement to itself. Under
these conditions, the molecules of the compound
would be constantly bombarded by a vast
number of electrons shot forth at enormous
velocities from the emanation. The notion was
that the molecules of the compound would break
down under the bombardment, and that the
atoms so produced might be knocked into
simpler groups of particles—in other words,
changed into other atoms—by the terrific, silent
shocks of the electrons fired at them incessantly
by the disintegrating emanation. Sir William
Ramsay regards his experimental results as
establishing a large probability in favour of the
assertion that compounds of copper were transformed
into compounds of lithium and sodium,
and compounds of thorium, of cerium, and of
certain other rare metals, into compounds of
carbon. The experimental evidence in favour
of this statement has not been accepted by
chemists as conclusive. A way has, however,
been opened which may lead to discoveries of
great moment.

Let us suppose that the transformation of one
element into another element or into other elements
has been accomplished. Let us suppose that
the conception of elementary atoms as very stable
arrangements of many identical particles, from
about a thousand to about a quarter of a million
times lighter than the atoms, has been justified
by crucial experiments. Let us suppose that
the conception of the minute grains of radio-active
substances as particular but constantly changing
arrangements of the same identical
particles, stable groups of which are the atoms
of the elements, has been firmly established.
One result of the establishment of the electronic
conception of atomic structure would be an
increase of our wonder at the complexity of
nature’s ways, and an increase of our wonder
that it should be possible to substitute a simple,
almost rigid, mechanical machinery for the ever-changing
flow of experience, and, by the use of
that mental mechanism, not only to explain very
many phenomena of vast complexity, but also
to predict occurrences of similar entanglement
and to verify these predictions.

The results which have been obtained in the
examination of radio-activity, of kathode rays,
of spectra at different temperatures, and of phenomena
allied to these, bring again into prominence
the ancient problem of the structure of what we
call matter. Is matter fundamentally homogeneous
or heterogeneous? Chemistry studies
the relations between the changes of composition
and the changes of properties which happen
simultaneously in material systems. The burning
fire of wood, coal, or gas; the preparation of
food to excite and to satisfy the appetite; the
change of minerals into the iron, steel, copper,
brass, lead, tin, lighting burning and lubricating
oils, dye-stuffs and drugs of commerce; the
change of the skins, wool, and hair of animals,
and of the seeds and fibres of plants, into
clothing for human beings; the manufacture
from rags, grass, or wood of a material fitted to
receive and to preserve the symbols of human
hopes, fears, aspirations, love and hate, pity and
aversion; the strange and most delicate processes
which, happening without cessation, in
plants and animals and men, maintain that
balanced equilibrium which we call life; and,
when the silver cord is being loosed and the
bowl broken at the cistern, the awful changes
which herald the approach of death; not only
the growing grass in midsummer meadows, not
only the coming of autumn “in dyed garments,
travelling in the glory of his apparel,” but
also the opening buds, the pleasant scents,
the tender colours which stir our hearts in
“the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
when birds do sing, ding-a*—dong-ding”: these,
and a thousand other changes have all their
aspects which it is the business of the chemist to
investigate. Confronted with so vast a multitude
of never-ceasing changes, and bidden to
find order there, if he can—bidden, rather
compelled by that imperious command which
forces the human mind to seek unity in variety,
and, if need be, to create a cosmos from a chaos;
no wonder that the early chemists jumped at
the notion that there must be, that there is, some
One Thing, some Universal Essence, which binds
into an orderly whole the perplexing phenomena
of nature, some Water of Paradise which is for
the healing of all disorder, some “Well at the
World’s End,” a draught whereof shall bring
peace and calm security.

The alchemists set forth on the quest. Their
quest was barren. They made the great mistake
of fashioning The One Thing, The Essence, The
Water of Paradise, from their own imaginings
of what nature ought to be. In their own
likeness they created their goal, and the road
to it. If we are to understand nature,
they cried, her ways must be simple; therefore, her
ways are simple. Chemists are people of a
humbler heart. Their reward has been greater
than the alchemists dreamed. By selecting a
few instances of material changes, and studying
these with painful care, they have gradually
elaborated a general conception of all those
transformations wherein substances are produced
unlike those by the interaction of which
they are formed. That general conception is
now both widening and becoming more definite.
To-day, chemists see a way opening before them
which they reasonably hope will lead them to a
finer, a more far-reaching, a more suggestive, at
once a more complex and a simpler conception of
material changes than any of those which have
guided them in the past.

INDEX

Air, ancient views regarding, 129.

—— views of Mayow and Rey regarding, 129.

Alchemical account of changes contrasted with chemical account, 169.

—— agent, the, 64.

—— allegories, examples of, 41, 97.

—— classification, 59.

—— doctrine of body, soul, and spirit of things, 48.

—— doctrine of transmutation, 47, 74, 123, 170.

—— language, 36, 96, 101, 102.

—— quest of the One Thing, modern form of, 179.

—— signs, 105.

—— theory, general sketch of, 26.

Alchemists, character of, according to Paracelsus, 25.

—— made many discoveries, 87.

—— sketches of lives of some, 115.

—— their use of fanciful analogies, 31.

Alchemy, beginnings of, 23.

—— change of, to chemistry, 126.

—— contrasted with chemistry, 202.

—— general remarks on, 123.

—— lent itself to imposture, 106.

—— object of, 9, 26, 32, 105.

—— probable origin of word, 25.

—— quotations to illustrate aims and methods of, 11-14.

Alembic, 92.

Apparatus and operations of alchemists, 90.

Art, the sacred, 122.

Atom, meaning given to word by Dalton, 173.

Atomic theory of Greeks, 16.

—— additions made to, by Dalton, 21.

—— as described by Lucretius, 19.

Atomic weight, 174.

Atoms and electrons, 190, 198.

Bacon’s remarks on alchemy, 95.

Balsamo, Joseph, 110.

Basil Valentine, his description of the three principles, 51.

—— his description of the four elements, 49.

—— some of his discoveries, 88.

Becquerel, his discovery of radiation of uranium, 181.

Body, soul, and spirit of things, alchemical doctrine of, 48.

Boyle, on calcination, 128.

—— on combustion, 141.

—— on elements, 161.

—— on the “hermetick philosophers,” 95.

—— on the language of the alchemists, 55.

—— on the natural state of bodies, 43.

Cagliostro, 110.

Calcination, 129, 132, 135, 140, 142, 151, 155.

Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, 107.

Chemical conception of material changes, 177.

Chemistry, aim of, 9, 26, 160.

—— change from alchemy to, 126.

—— methods of, 10.

—— probable origin of word, 24.

Classification, alchemical methods of, 59.

Colours, Lucretius’ explanation of differences between, 18.

Combustion, 141.

Compounds, chemical conception of, 171.

Conservation of mass, 164.

Curie, her discovery of radium, 182.

Dalton’s additions to the Greek atomic theory, 21, 172.

Democritus, his saying about atoms, 15.

Dephlogisticated air, 147.

Destruction, thought by alchemists to precede restoration, 65, 127.

Electrons, 187-189, 197, 198.

Elements, alchemical, contrasted with chemical, 165;
radio-active substances contrasted with, 190-192.

—— the alchemical, 49, 54, 60.

—— the chemical, 61, 62, 161.

—— use of word, by phlogisteans, 133.

Essence, the alchemical, 32, 35, 49, 58, 72.

Fire, different meanings of the word, 53.

Gates, the alchemical, 69.

Gold, considered by alchemists to be the most perfect metal, 40, 45.

Greek thinkers, their atomic theory, 15.

Hermes Trismegistus, 37.

Kathode rays, 188.

Language of alchemy, 96.

—— purposely made misleading, 36.

Lavoisier on calcination, 153, 155.

—— his use of word element, 194.

—— his use of word principle, 163, note.

—— on object of chemistry, 160.

—— on oxygen, 155.

—— on systems in science, 163.

—— on the principle of acidity, 59, 155.

—— on the reactions of metals with acids, 158.

—— on the transmutation of water to earth, 152.

Lockyer, on spectra of elements, 181.

Lucretius, his theory of nature, 16.

Magic, characteristics of, 23, 24.

Material changes, Greek theory of, 15.

Metals, alchemical connexion between, and plants, 34.

—— compared by alchemists with vegetables, 33.

—— mortification of, 65.

—— seed of, 34.

—— their desire to become gold, 40.

—— transmutation of, 33, 39, 46.

Natural state of bodies, 39, 43.

Oxygen, 144, 145.

Paracelsus, his description of alchemists, 25.

—— his distinction between natural and artificial mortification, 65.

—— sketch of life of, 117.

Pelican, 92.

Perfection, alchemical teaching regarding, 27, 40.

Phlogistic theory, 133, 139.

Phlogiston, 126, 130, 137.

Priestley, his discovery of oxygen, 144.

Principles, the alchemical, 49, 51, 54, 60, 133.

—— Lavoisier’s use of the word, 163, note.

Radio-active substances, are they elements? 191, 194, 195;
properties of, 185-187.

Radio-activity, characteristics of, 183, 184;
of radium, 186;
of thorium, 193;
of uranium, 193.

Radium, emanation of, 187;
heat from, 186;
rays from, 186.

Ramsay, on transmutation of elements, 199.

Regimens, the alchemical, 72.

Sacred art, the, 122.

Scientific theories, general characters of, 21, 150.

Seed, alchemical doctrine of, 56.

Seeds of metals, 34.

Simplicity, asserted by alchemists to be the mark of nature, 28, 38.

—— is not necessarily the mark of verity, 138.

Solids, liquids, and gases, atomic explanation of, 19.

Stahl, his phlogistic theory, 130.

Stone, the philosopher’s, 32, 35, 49, 58, 72.

Thorium, radio-activity of, 183, 193.

Transmutation, alchemical doctrine of, 47, 74, 123.

—— character of him who would attempt, 63.

—— of metals, 33, 39, 46, 74.

—— of metals into gold, alchemical account of, 75.

—— of water to earth, 151.

Transmutations, apparent examples of, 82.

Uranium, radio-activity of, 183, 192;
relation of, to radium, 192, 193.

Vegetables compared with metals by alchemists, 33.

Water contains hydrogen and oxygen, examination of this phrase, 167.

Water, different meanings of the word, 53, 167.

FOOTNOTES