Part 1 Alchemy

ALCHEMY. In the narrow sense of the word, alchemy is the
pretended art of making gold and silver, or transmuting the
base metals into the noble ones. The idea of such transmutation
probably arose among the Alexandrian Greeks in the early
centuries of the Christian era; thence it passed to the
Arabs, by whom it was transmitted to western Europe, and its
realization was a leading aim of chemical workers down to the
time of Paracelsus and even later. But ``alchemy'' was something
more than a particularly vain and deluded manifestation of
the thirst for gold, as it is sometimes represented; in its
wider and truer significance it stands for the chemistry of
the middle ages. The idea of transmutation, in the country
of its origin, had a philosophical basis, and was linked
up with the Greek theories of matter there current; thus,
by supplying a central philosophical principle, it to some
extent unified and focussed chemical effort, which previously,
so far as it existed at all, had been expended on acquiring
empirical acquaintance with a mass of disconnected technical
processes. Alchemy in this sense is merely an early phase of
the development of systematic chemistry; in Liebig's words, it
was ``never at any time anything different from chemistry.''