advance knowledge, but to record a technological complex that, in Multhauf’s opinion, ‘although sophisticated, had been virtually static throughout the Christian era’. Generally speaking they discussed only apparatus and reagents, and provided recipes that used distillation methods. Many recipes, especially those for artists’ pigments and dyes, bear an astonishing resemblance to those found in the aurifictive papyri of the third century and therefore imply continuity in craftsmen’s recipes for making imitation jewellery, textile dyeing, inks, paints and cheap, but impressive, chemical ‘tricks’.
One such book was the Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480–1538), which was published in Italy in 1540. This gave a detailed survey of contemporary metallurgy, the manufacture of weapons and the use of water-power-driven machinery. For the first time there was an explicit stress upon the value of assaying as a guide to the scaling up of operations and the regular reporting of quantitative measurements in the various recipes. On alchemy, despite retaining the traditional view that metals grew inside the earth, Biringuccio provides a sceptical view based upon personal observation and experience6:
Now in having spoken and in speaking thus I have no thought of wishing to detract from or decrease the virtues of this art, if it has any, but I have only given my opinion, based on the facts of the matter. I could still discourse concerning the art of transmutation, or alchemy as it is called, yet neither through my own efforts nor those of others (although I have sought with great diligence) have I ever had the fortune to see anything worthy of being approved by good men, or that it was not necessary to abandon as imperfect for one cause or another even before it was half finished. For this reason I surely deserve to be excused, all the more because I know that I am drawn by more powerful reasons, or, perhaps by natural inclination, to follow the path of mining more willingly than alchemy, even though mining is a harder task, both physical and mental, is more expensive, and promises less at first sight and in words than does alchemy; and it has as its scope the observation of Nature’s powers rather than those of art – or indeed of seeing what really exists rather than what one thinks exists.
That is succinctly put: by the sixteenth century, the natural ores of metals, and their separations and transformations by heat, acids and distillations, had become more interesting and financially fruitful than time spent fruitlessly on speculative transmutations.
Alchemy had been transmuted into chemistry, as the change of name reflected. Here a digression into the origins of the word ‘chemistry’ seems appropriate. There is, in fact, no scholarly consensus over the origins of the Greek word ‘chemeia’ or ‘chymia’. One familiar suggestion has been a derivation of the Coptic word ‘Khem’, meaning the black land (Egypt), and etymological transfer to the blackening processes in dyeing, metallurgy and pharmacy. What is certain is that philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle had no word for chemistry, for the term ‘chymia’, meaning to fuse or cast a metal, dates only from about 300 AD. A Chinese origin from the word ‘Kim-Iya’, meaning ‘gold-making juice’, has not been authenticated, though Needham has plausibly suggested that the root ‘chem’ may be equivalent to the Chinese ‘chin’, as in the phrase for the art of transmutation, lien chin shu. The Cantonese pronunciation of this phrase would be, roughly, lin kem shut, i.e. with a hard ‘k’ sound. Needham concludes that we have the possibility that ‘the name for the Chinese “gold art”, crystallised in the syllable chin (kiem) spread over the length and breadth of the Old World, evoking first the Greek terms for chemistry and then, indirectly, the Arabic one’.
Whatever the etymology, the Latin and English words alchemia, alchemy and chemistry were derived from the Arabic name of the art, ‘al Kimiya’ or ‘alkymia’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Arabic definite article, ‘al’, was dropped in the sixteenth century when scholars began to grasp the etymology of the Latin ‘alchimista’, the chemist or practitioner; but it is far more likely to have followed Paracelsus’ decision to refer to medical chemistry as ‘chymia’ or ‘iatrochemia’. The word ‘chymia’ was also used extensively by the humanist physician, Georg Agricola (1494–1555), whose study of the German mining industry, De re metallica, was published in 1556. Although he used Latin coinages such as ‘chymista’ and ‘chymicus’, it is clear from their context that he was still referring, however, to alchemy, alchemical techniques and alchemists, and that he was, in the tradition of humanism, attempting to purify the spelling of a classical root that had been barbarized by Arabic contamination.
Agricola’s simplifications were widely adopted, notably in the Latin dictionary compiled by the Swiss naturalist, Konrad Gesner (1516–65) in 1551, as well as in his De remediis secretis: liber physicus, medicus et partim etiam chymicus (Zurich, 1552). As Rocke has shown, the latter work on pharmaceutical chemistry was widely translated into English, French and Italian, and seems to have been the fountain for the words that became the basis of modern European vocabulary: chimique, chimico, chymiste, chimist, etc. Curiously, the German translation of Gesner continued to render ‘chymistae’ as ‘Alchemisten’. German texts only moved towards the form Chemie and Chemiker in the early 1600s.
By then, influenced by the practical textbook tradition instituted by Libavius, as well as by the iatrochemistry of Paracelsus (chapter 2), ‘alchymia’ or ‘alchemy’ were increasingly terms confined to esoteric religious practices, while ‘chymia’ or ‘chemistry’ were used to label the long tradition of pharmaceutical and technological empiricism.
When the economist, John Maynard Keynes, bought some of Newton’s manuscripts in 1936 when Newton’s papers were unfortunately dispersed, he drew attention to the non-mathematical, ‘irrational’ side of Newton. Here was a famous scientist who had spent an equal part of his time, if not the major part, on a chronology of the scriptures, alchemy, occult medicine and biblical prophecies. For Keynes, Newton had been the last of the magicians. Historians have tended to ignore Newton’s alchemical and religious interests, or simply denied that they had anything to do with his work in mathematics, physics and astronomy. More recently, however, historians such as Robert Westfall and Betty Jo Dobbs, who have immersed themselves in the estimated one million words of Newton’s surviving alchemical manuscripts, have seen his interest in alchemy as integral to his approach to the natural world. They view Newton as deeply influenced by the Neoplatonic and Hermetic movements of his day, which, for Newton, promised to open a window on the structure of matter and the hidden powers and energies of Nature that elsewhere he tried to express and explain in the language of corpuscles, attractions and repulsions.
For example, the German scholar, Karin Figula, has been able to demonstrate that Newton was steeped in the work of Michael Sendivogius (1556–1636?), a Polish alchemist who worked at the Court of Emperor Rudolph II at Prague, where he successfully demonstrated an apparent transmutation in 1604. In his several writings, which were translated and circulated in Britain, Sendivogius wrote of a ‘secret food of life’ that vivified all the creatures and minerals of the world7:
Man, like all other animals, dies when deprived of air, and nothing will grow in the world without the force and virtue of the air, which penetrates, alters, and attracts to itself the multiplying nutriment.
As we shall see in the following chapter, this Stoic and Neoplatonic concept of a universal animating spirit, or pneuma, which bathed the cosmos, was to stimulate some interesting experimental work on combustion and respiration in the 1670s.
In a spurious work of Paracelsus, Von den natürlichen Dingen, it had been predicted that a new Elijah would appear in Europe some sixty years after the master’s death. A new age would be ushered in, in which God would finally reveal the secrets of Nature. This prophecy may explain why, as William Newman
