FIG.

    An alchemical laboratory (Frontispiece)

 1.  The mortification of metals presented by the image of A king
    devouring his son

 2 and 3.  The mortification of metals presented by images of death
   and burial

 4 and 5.  Two must be conjoined to produce one

 6.  Hermetically sealing the neck of A glass vessel

 7.  Sealing by means of A mercury Trap

 8.  An alchemical common cold still

 9.  A BALNEUM MARIAE

10.  Alchemical distilling apparatus

11.  A pelican

12.  An alchemist with A retort

13.  An alchemist preparing oil of vitriol

14.  Alchemical apparatus for rectifying spirits

15.  Purifying gold presented by the image of A salamander in the fire

16.  Priestley’s apparatus for working with gases

17.  Apparatus used by Lavoisier in his experiments on burning mercury
    in air

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.