 6 Alchemy as an experimental art A modern writer, Mr. A. E. Waite, in his Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers says the philosophical 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 be 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 today 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 Urfa says in his Histoire de la Chimy, to gear at the alchemical theory is to commit at once an anachronism and an injustice unless the world should finish tomorrow. 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. 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 Urfa's Histoire de la Chimy. The reader is supposed to be present at experiments conducted in the laboratory of a grand master of the sacred art in the fifth or sixth 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 earth and air. 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 transformation 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. 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 calcs. When the 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 be 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. 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. Experiment. The vapor 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 affected. Experiment. Mercury is allowed to fall in a fine rain onto melted sulphur, a black substance is produced. This black substance is heated in a closed vessel. It is volatilized 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, by heating in a distillation apparatus, the products are, in each case, a solid residue, liquids which distill off, and certain spirits which are disengaged. The results, support of 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. That was regarded sometimes as the means of purification, sometimes as the soul or invisible part of all substances. Experiment. A strong acid is poured onto 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 reappears and the iron vanishes. But 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 manufacturers, 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 metal came into use, glass mirrors were manufactured, and considerable advances were made in practical medicine and sanitation. 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 mercene 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. Urfa 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 Urfa remarks, this is perhaps one of the earliest accounts of the gas discovered by priestly and studied by Lavoisier, the gas we now call oxygen, and recognise as of paramount importance in chemical reactions. 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, Doctor in Physics. The method recommended by French for hermetically sealing the neck of a glass vessel is shown in figure six. The neck of the vessel is surrounded by a tray containing burning coals. When the glass melts, it is cut off by shears, then closed by tongs, which are made hot before use. Figure seven represents a method for covering an open vessel, airtight, with a receptacle into which a substance may be sublime 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. When you put water into a seething balneum wherein there are glasses, let it be hot, or else they will endanger the breaking of the glasses. When they are takest any earthen or glass vessel from the fire, expose it not to the cold air too suddenly, for fear it should break. In all your operations diligently observe the processes which you read, and vary not a little from them, for sometimes a small mistake or neglect spoils the whole operation and frustrates your expectations. Try not at first experiments of great cost or great difficulty, for it will be a great discouragement to thee, and thou wilt be very apt to mistake. If anyone would enter upon the practices of chemistry, let him apply himself to some expert artist for to be instructed in the manual operation of things, for by this means he will learn more in two months, than he can by his practice and study in seven years, as also avoid much pains and cost and redeem much time which else of necessity he will lose. Figure eight represents a common cold still, and figure nine is a sketch of an apparatus for distilling by the aid of boiling water. The bath where in the vessels are placed in figure nine was called by the alchemists Balneum Marie, from Mary the duess, 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 duess. A writer of the seventh 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. Figure ten 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. Figure eleven shows a pelican, that is, a vessel where in a liquid might be heated for a long time, and the volatile products be constantly returned to the original vessel. Figure twelve 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 salt peter, 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. Note, one of the figures represents an apparatus very like those advertised today as Turkish baths at home. End note. 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 fir trees appear in turpentine, to make a plant growing two or three hours, to make the representation of the whole world in a glass, to extract a white milky substance from the rays of the moon. The process of making oil of vitriol by burning sulfur under a hood fitted with a side tube for the outflow of the oil of vitriol is represented in figure 13. Figure 14 is interesting. It is an apparatus for rectifying spirits by distilling and liquefying only the most volatile portions of the distillate. The spirit to us liquor was heated, and the vapours caused to traverse a long zigzag tube, where in 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 today 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 manufacturers. We may laugh at many of their theories and regret that much useless material was accumulated by them. We may agree with Boyle at the end of the 17th century when he likens the hermetic 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 hermetic philosophers present us, together with diverse substantial and noble experiments, theories which either like peacock feathers make a great show, but are neither solid nor useful, or else like apes, if they have some appearance of being rational or 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 sky entiarum, Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons that he had left them gold buried somewhere in his vineyard, where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould about the roots of the vines, procured a plentiful vintage, so the search and endeavours to make gold have brought many useful inventions and instructive experiments to light. 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 Sendevogius 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 say that of far-fetched allegory. The alchemical writings are bound in such allegories. Here are two of them. The first allegory is taken from the twelve keys of Basilius Valentinas, the Benedictine. The eleventh key to the knowledge of augmentation of our stone I will put before you in the form of a parable. There lived in the east a gilded knight named Orpheus, who was possessed of immense wealth, and had everything that heart can wish. He had taken to wife his own sister Eurydice, who did not, however, bear him any children. This he regarded as the punishment of his sin in having wedded his own sister, and was instant in prayer to God, both by day and by night, that the curse might be taken from him. One night when he was buried in a deep sleep, there came to him a certain winged messenger named Phoebus, who touched his feet, which were very hot, and said, Thou noble knight, since thou hast wandered through many cities and kingdoms, and suffered many things at sea, in battle, and in the lists, the heavenly Father has bidden me make known to thee the following means of obtaining thy prayer. Take blood from thy right side, and from the left side of thy spouse. For this blood is the heart's blood of your parents, and though it may seem to be of two kinds, yet in reality it is only one. Mix the two kinds of blood, and keep the mixture tightly enclosed in the globe of the seven wise masters. Then that which is generated will be nourished with its own flesh and blood, and will complete its course of development when the moon has changed for the eighth time. If thou repeat this process again and again, thou shall see children's children, and the offspring of thy body shall fill the world. When Phoebus had thus spoken he winged his flight heavenwards. In the morning the night arose and did the bidding of the celestial messenger, and God gave to him and to his wife many children who inherited their father's glory, wealth, and nightly honours from generation to generation. Then the dedicatory epistle to his triumphal chariot of antimony, Basil Valentine addresses his brother Alchemist as follows, Mercury appeared to me in a dream, and brought me back from my devious courses to the one way. Behold me, clad not in the garb of the vulgar, but in the philosopher's mantle. So he said, and straightway began to leap along the road in headlong bounds. Then when he was tired he sat down and, turning to me who had followed him in the spirit, bade me mark that he no longer possessed that youthful vigor, with which he would at the first have overcome every obstacle if he had not been allowed a free course. Encouraged by his friendly salutation I addressed him in the following terms, Mercury, eloquent scion of Atlas, and father of all Alchemists, since thou hast guided me hitherto, show me, I pray thee, the way to those blessed aisles which thou hast promised to reveal to all thine elect children. Doest thou remember, he replied, that when I acquitted thy laboratory I left behind me a garment so thoroughly saturated with my own blood, that neither the wind could efface it nor all devouring time destroy its indelible essence, fetch it hither to me, that I may not catch a chill from the state of perspiration in which I now am, but let me close myself warmly in it, and be closely incited thereto, so that I may safely reach my bride who is sick with love. She hath meekly borne many wrongs, being driven through water and fire, and compelled to ascend and descend, times without number, yet has she been carried through it all by the hope of entering with me the bridal chamber, wherein we expect to beget a son adorned from his birth with the royal crown, which he may not share with others. Yet may he bring his friends to the palace, where sits enthroned the King of Kings, who communicates his dignity readily and liberally to all that approach him. I brought him the garment, and it fitted him so closely that it looked like an iron skin securing him against all the assaults of Vulcan. Let us proceed, he then said, and straightway sped across the open field, while I boldly strove to keep up with my guide. Thus we reached his bride, whose virtue and constancy were equal to his own. There I beheld their marvellous conjugal union, and nuptial consummation. Whence was born the son crowned with the royal diadem? When I was about to salute him as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, my genius stood by me and warned me not to be deceived, since this was only the King's forerunner, but not the King himself whom I sought. When I heard the admonition, I did not know whether to be sad or joyful. Depart, then said Mercury, with this bridal gift, and when you come to those disciples who have seen the Lord himself, show them this sign. And therewith he gave me a gold ring from his son's finger. They know the golden branch, which must be consecrated to Prosopina, before you can enter the palace of Pluto. When he sees this ring, perhaps one will open to you with the word, the door of that chamber, where sits enthroned in his magnificence the desire of all nations who is known only to the sages. When he had thus spoken, the vision vanished, but the bridal gift, which I still held in my hand, showed me that it had not been a mere dream. It was of gold, but to me more precious than the most prized of all metals. Unto you I will show it, when I am permitted to see your faces, and to converse with you freely, till that earnestly wished for time I bid you farewell. 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 cohabated 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. Mayhung, 17th century, nature addresses the alchemical worker in the following words, you break vials and consume coals only to soften your brains still more with the vapours. You also digest alum, salt, opiment, and altrument. You melt metals, build small and large furnaces, and use many vessels. Nevertheless, I am sick of your folly, and you suffocate me with your sulphurous smoke. You would do better to mind your own business than to dissolve and distill so many absurd substances, and then to pass them through alembics, cucurbits, stills, and pelicans. Henry Maddathanus, writing in 1622, says, Then I understood that their purgations, sublimations, cementations, distillations, rectifications, circulations, putrefactions, conjunctions, calcinations, incinerations, mortifications, revivifications, as also their tripods, Nathanus, reverbitry, alembics, excrements of horses, ashes, sand, stills, pelican vials, retorts, fixations, et cetera, armier, plausible impostures, and frauds. The author of The Only Way, 1677, says, Surely every true artist must look on this elaborate issue of baseless operations as the merest folly, and can only wonder that the eyes of those silly dupes are not at last opened, that they may see something besides such absurd sofisms, and read something beside those stupid and deceitful books. I can speak from bitter experience, for I too toiled for many years, and endeavored to reach the coveted goal by sublimation, distillation, calcination, circulation, and so forth, and to fashion the stone out of substances such as urine, salt, atrament, alum, et cetera. I have tried hard to evolve it out of hairs, wine, eggs, bones, and all manner of herbs, out of arsenic, mercury, and sulfur, and all the minerals and metals. I have spent nights and days in dissolving, coagulating, amalgamating, and precipitating. Yet from all these things I derived neither profit nor joy. 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 Johnson's play, The Alchemist, Surley, who is the skeptic of the piece, says to Suttle, who is the alchemist? Alchemy is a pretty kind of game, somewhat like tricks of the cards to cheat a man with charming. What else are all your terms? Where on know one of your writers grieved with other? Of your elixir, your lack virginess, your stone, your medicine, and your Chrysospherm, your sal, your sulfur, and your mercury, your oil of height, your tree of life, your blood, your marchesite, your tutti, your magnesia, your toad, your crow, your dragon, and your panther, your sun, your moon, your firmament, your adrop, your leto, azote, zernich, chibrit, uterite, and then your red man and your white woman, with all your broths, your menstrues, and materials of lyre and eggshells, women's terms, man's blood, hair of the head, burnt clout, chalk, myrds, and clay, powder of bones, scaling of iron, glass, and moulds of other strange ingredients, would burst a man to name. To which Suttle answers, and all these named, intending but one thing, which art our writers used to obscure their art, was not all the knowledge of the Egyptians' written mystic symbols, speak not the scriptures oft in parables, art not the choicest fables of the poets that were the fountains and first springs of wisdom wrapped in perplexed allegories? 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. Figure 15, reduced from the Book of Lambspring, represents this process. Note the heading to figure 15. 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. End note. 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. Read as a note. There follows a series of symbols, illustrating the following alchemical materials and objects. Saturn, also lead. Jupiter, also tin. Two symbols for Mars, also iron. Sol, also gold. Venus, also copper. Three symbols for Mercury. Oh, lunar, also silver. Sulfur, vitriol, fire, air. Two symbols for water, earth. Aquafortis, aquaregis. Aquavite, day, night, amalgam, and olympic. End of chapter 7. Chapter 8 of the story of alchemy, recording by Peter Yersley. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. The story of alchemy and the beginnings of chemistry by M. M. Patterson Muir. Chapter 8. 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 us their reason for desiring to make gold, to 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 that 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 fourteenth century. The false chanun persuaded the priest who was his dupe to send his servant for quicksilver, which he promised to make into as good silver and as fine as there is any in your purse or mine. He then gave the priest a crosslet and bid him put it on the fire and blow the coals. While the priest was busy with the fire, this false chanun, the foul fiend him fetcher, out of his bosom took a beech and coal in which full subtly was made and whole, in which full subtly was made and whole, and therein put was of silver lameil an ounce and stop it was without an fail the hole with wax to keep the lameil in. The false chanun pretended to be sorry for the priest who was so busily blowing the fire. You've been right hoot, I see well how you sweat. I hear a cloth and wipe away the wet, and while as that the priest wiped his face, this chanun took his coal with harder grace and laid it above, upon the midward of the crosslet, and blew well afterwards, till that the coal's gone fast brain. As the coal burned, the silver fell into the crosslet. Then the chanun 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 chanun formed the chalk into a mould and poured the contents of the crucible into it. Then he batted the priest, look what there is, put in thine hand and grope, thou fine shalt there silver, as I hope. What devil o' hell, should it elders be? Shaving of silver, silver is, pardon me. He put his hand in and took up a tain of silver fine and glad in every vein was this priest when he saw that it was so. The conclusion of the chanun'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 name of the privy stone. Plato gives him certain directions and tells him he must use magnesium. The disciple asks, what is magnesium? Good sire, I you pray. It is a water that is made, I say, of elementus four. Quadplato, tell me the root to good sire. Quoth he, though, of that water, if it be your will. Nay, nay, Quadplato, certain that I kneel. The philosophers sworn were every Joe one that they shouldn't discover it unto no one. Nay, in no book it writer in no manner. For unto Christ it is so leaf and dear that he will not that it discovered be. But where it liketh to his deity? Man for ten-spire, and eek for to defend whom that him liketh, lo, this is the end. 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 imposters, 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. Footnote The account of the life of Cagliostro is much condensed from Mr. A. E. Waites' Lives of the Alchemistical Philosophers End Footnote 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 Akkarat. When he was 13 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 60 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 Cacliostro. In Messina he met a mysterious person whom he calls Altotes, and from whom, he says in his memoir, he learnt much. The following account of the meeting of Balsamo and to the stranger is taken from Waites' 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 kaftan, 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. Cacliostro saluted this grotesque being who bowed slightly, but with satisfied dignity. You do not reside in Messina, signant, he said in Sicilian, but with a mark for an accent. Cacliostro replied that he was tearing 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 individualizing 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 Cacliostro 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 any rate vanished. Cacliostro 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, Lorenzo Filiziani, and married him. Cacliostro 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 seemed to have made a living by the sale of lotions for the skin and by practising skillful deceptions. About the year 1770, Cacliostro 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 well-being made by its founder to those who joined it. Lodges were established in many countries, many disciples were obtained, great riches were amassed, and Cacliostro flourished exceedingly. In his Histoire du Merveil dans les temps modernes, Figuer, speaking of Cacliostro 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 Balsama 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 belabored 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. Cacliostro 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 affected by substituting a living child for the dead one, forced him to flee laden with spoil, to Warsaw and then to Strasbourg. Cacliostro entered Strasbourg 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 Balsamu, it is Joseph, rogue, where are my sixty ounces of gold? Cacliostro 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 goldsmiths, and the brilliant cortège passed on out from the book by weight in note. From Strasbourg Cacliostro 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. Going 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 9 Paracelsus and some other alchemists The accounts which have come to us of the men who followed the pursuit of thee, one thing, are vague, scrappy and confusing. Alchemical books abound in quotations from the writings of Gaber. 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. Hertha says he probably lived in the middle of the eighth century, was a native of Mesopotamia, and was named Jabbar al- Konfi. Weight calls him Abu Musa Jafar al-Sofi. Some of the medieval 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 ninth century, refer to Gaber as their master. All the manuscripts of writings attributed to Gaber, which have been examined, are in Latin, but the Library of Leiden is said to possess some work by him written in Arabic. These manuscripts contain directions for preparing many metals, salts, acids, oils, etc., and for performing such operations as distillation, cupillation, dissolution, calcination, and the like. Of the other Arabian alchemists, the most celebrated in the Middle Ages were Rasis, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, who are supposed to have lived in the ninth and tenth centuries. The following story of al-Farabi's powers is taken from Weitz's Lives of the Alchemistical Philosophers. Al-Farabi was returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca when passing through Syria he stopped at the court of the Sultan and entered his presence while he was surrounded by numerous sage persons who were discoursing with the monarch on the sciences. Al-Farabi presented himself in his traveling attire, and when the Sultan desired he should be seated, with astonishing philosophical freedom he planted himself at the end of the royal sofa. The Prince, aghast at his boldness, called one of his officers, and in a tongue generally unknown, commanded him to eject the intruder. The philosopher, however, promptly made answer in the same tongue. Oh, Lord! He who acts hastily is liable to hasty repentance. The Prince was equally astounded to find himself understood by the stranger, as by the manner in which the reply was given. Anxious to know more of his guest, he began to question him, and soon discovered that he was acquainted with seventy languages. Conversations for discussion were then propounded to the philosophers, who had witnessed the discertious intrusion with considerable indignation and disgust, but Al-Farabi disputed with so much eloquence and vivacity that he reduced all the doctors to silence, and they began writing down his discourse. The Sultan then ordered his musicians to perform for the diversion of the company. When they struck up, the philosopher accompanied them on a lute with such infinite grace and tenderness that he elicited the unmeasured admiration of the whole distinguished assembly. At the request of the Sultan, he produced a piece of his own composing, sang it, and accompanied it with great force and spirit to the delight of all his hearers. The air was so sprightly that even the gravest philosopher could not resist dancing, but by another tune he as easily melted them to tears, and then by a soft, unobtrusive melody he lulled the whole company to sleep. The most remarkable of the alchemists was he who is generally known as Paracelsus. He was born about fourteen ninety-three and died about fifteen forty. It is probable that the place of his birth was Ayn C. Delna, 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 Oriolas Philippus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. His father in alchemy, Trimethius Abertus Spannheim, and then of Würzburg, 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 Greco-Latin paraphrase of von Hohenheim, note of High Lineage, end note, and Namine belonging to a lofty place. Others say it signifies greater than Celsus, who was a celebrated Latin writer and medicine of the first century. Paracelsus studied at the University of Baal, 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, chyromantic soothsang, and it has been said by necromantic practices. He may have got as far as Constantinople, as a rumor floated about that he received the stone of wisdom from an adept in that city. He returned to Baal 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 shows that his style of writing was abusive, and his opinion of himself, to say the least, not very humble. From the middle of this age the monarchy of all the arts has been at length, derived and conferred on me Theophrastus Paracelsus, prince of philosophy and medicine. For this purpose I have been chosen by God to extinguish and blot out all the fantasies of the elaborate and false works of delusive and presumptuous words, be they the words of Aristotle, Galen, Avicenna, Mesva, or the dogmas of any among their followers. My theory, proceeding as it does from the light of nature, can never, through its consistency, pass away or be changed, but in the fifty-eighth year after its millennium and a half it will then begin to flourish. The practice at the same time following upon the theory will be proved by wonderful and incredible science, so as to be open to mechanics and common people, and they will thoroughly understand how firm and immovable is that paraselcik art against the triflings of the Sophists, though meanwhile that Sophistical science has to have its ineptitude propped up and fortified by papal and imperial privileges. So then you wormy and lousy Sophist, since you deem the monarch of Arcana a mere ignorant, factuous and prodigal quack, now in this mid-age I determine in my present treatise to disclose the honourable course of procedure in these matters the virtues and preparation of the celebrated tincture of the philosophers for the use and honour of all who love the truth and in order that all who despise the true arts may be reduced to poverty. The turbulent and restless spirit of Paracelsus brought him into open conflict with the authorities of Baal. 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 Ain C. Deln. 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 Hermes, 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 clasped with metals but lacked the essential metaline character of ductility. He made medicinal preparations of mercury, lead, and iron, and introduced many new and powerful drugs, notably Lordenum. 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, racis, montagnana, and the others, you after me, not I after you, you of Paris, you of Montpellier, you of Svebia, of Mycenae, 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. But he's 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 affect in his struggle to rest 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, each man has all the wisdom and power of the world in himself. He possesses one kind of knowledge as much as another, and he who does not find that which is in him cannot truly say that he does not possess it, but only that he was not capable of successfully seeking for it. 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 burgamaster 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 parson's, for I do not at all love those who teach what they do not themselves practice. CHAPTER 10 OF THE STORY OF ALCHEMY The story of alchemy and the beginnings of chemistry by M. M. Paterson CHAPTER 10 SUMMARY OF THE ALCHEMICAL DOCTRINE THE REPLACEMENT OF THE THREE PRINCIPLES OF THE ALCHEMISTES BY THE SINGLE PRINCIPLE OF FLUGISTON The sacred art, which had its origin and home in Egypt, was very definitely associated with the religious rites and the theological teaching recognized 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 piety, 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 Egyptian 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 ninth until towards the end of the eighteenth 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 recognized 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 thought that the true transformation in alchemical language the transmutation of one thing into another could be affected 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 fake 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 was 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 generalizations 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 connection between alchemy and witchcraft, which is where people who are 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 realization 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 realization 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 dominance 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 practiced 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 preceding 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 onto 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 the logiston, for the three principles of sort, sulfur, and mercury. This step was taken by concentrating attention and the investigation by replacing the superficial examination of many diverse phenomena by the more searching study of one class of occurrences. That's 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 burned metal is calcined with another substance, with grains of wheat or powdered charcoal. Led there, too, by their theory that destruction must precede revivification, death must come before resurrection, the alchemists can find 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. Sulfur, 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 burned sulfur, 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 preceded the alchemical argument that life can be brought into the mortified sulfur, 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 affected 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 called theoretical when they wished to condemn an explanation and put it out of court, because it was merely a restatement 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 was 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 that they should consider what part the air might play in calcinations. He spoke of the air as a menstruum or aditament, 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 recognized 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 second and the early part of the third century A.D., seems to have regarded the air as playing a very important part in combustions. He said, Ares 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 seventeenth century by Jean Ré, a French physician, and by John Mayo 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 eighteenth century. They were overshadowed and put aside by the work of style, 1660 to 1724. Some of the alchemists of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth 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, Ray and Mayo. It was adopted by style, 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 affected by the agency of fire, style invented a new principle which he named phlogiston, and constructed a hypothesis which is generally known as the phlogistic theory. He explained and applied this hypothesis in various books, especially in one published at Al in 1717. Style observed that many substances which differed much from one another in various aspects were like 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, meaning burned or set on fire. Style 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 reform 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 heats the mixture, you are bringing the burnt matter under conditions which are very favorable 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, sulfur, 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 clasped 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 emphasized 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 phlogistians taught that the earthy principle of a metal remains in the form of ash, cinders, or calcs when the metal is calcined, or as they expressed it when the metal is deprived of its phlogiston. The phlogistic theory savored 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 style 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 style often spoke of metals as composed of phlogiston and an element of an earthy character. This expression was also an advance from the hazy notion of element in purely alchemical writings towards accuracy and fullness of description. An element was now something which could be 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 reformation of a metal from its calcs, i.e. the earthy substance which remains after combustion, as the combination of two things to produce one apparently homogeneous substance. Metals appeared to the phlogistians, as they appeared to the alchemists to be composite substances. Processes of burning were regarded by alchemists and phlogistians 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 a 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 realized 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 calc 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 today as it was answered by the upholders of the phlogistic theory in the middle of the eighteenth 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 color or taste or smell, for the color, taste or smell of a thing may certainly be made less by adding something else, and the color, 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 trimmels 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. And such words as iron, copper, water and gold are to him merely convenient expressions for certain definable groups of properties, but the phlogistians 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 today, 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 generalizations 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 today, one property common to many substances. The phlogistic theory acted as a very useful means for collecting and placing in a favorable 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 emphasized the fundamental similarity between all processes of combustion. The theory of phlogiston was extraordinarily simple, compared with the alchemical vagaries which preceded it. Herford says in his Istva de la Chimi, if it is true that simplicity is the distinctive character of verity never was a theory so true as that of style. 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, style 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 accustomed 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. End of chapter 10. Chapter 11 of The Story of Alchemy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Peter Yersley. The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry by M. M. Pattison Muir. Chapter 11. 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 behavior of the same substance when heated sometimes varies when the conditions are changed. He takes the example of heating sulfur 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 avoids the 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 subtle 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's 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 diverse 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 logistic theory and confirmed the alchemical opinion that the action of fire is essentially a simplifying action were published about 40 years later. But fifty years before Boyle a French physician named Jean-Raye 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 Mayo, 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. Mayo 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. Mayo 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. Ray said calcination of a metal at any rate probably consists in the fixation of particles of air by the substance which is calcined. Mayo 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 Mayo'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 Mayo'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 Mayo'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 heirs of different kinds by the action 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 12 inches diameter and 20 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 endeavored to extract air from mercurious 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 the apparatus used by priestly and his experiments on different kinds of air is represented in figure 16 which is reduced from an illustration in priestly's book on airs priestly 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 priestly after some months priestly 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 priestly 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 priestly was a thoroughgoing flugistian he seems to have been able to describe the results of his experiments only in the language of the flugistic theory just as the results of most of the experiments made today 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 the upholder of the flugistic theory could not think of burning as possible unless there was a suitable receptacle for the flugistan of the burning substance when burning occurred in the air the part played by the air according to the flugistic chemist was to receive the expelled flugistan in this sense the air acted as the pabulum or nourishment of the burning substance in as much as substance is burned more vigorously and brilliantly in the new air than in common air priestly argued that the new air was more ready more eager than ordinary air to receive flugistan and therefore that the new air contained less flugistan than ordinary air or perhaps no flugistan arguing thus priestly of course named the new air reform substance de-flugisticated air and thought of it as ordinary air deprived of some or it might be all of its flugistan the breathing of animals and the burning of substances were supposed to load the atmosphere with flugistan priestly 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 de-flugisticating processes as he had obtained his de-flugisticated air by heating the calcs of mercury that is the powder produced by calcining mercury in the air priestly was forced to suppose that the calcination of mercury in the air must be a more complex occurrence than merely the expulsion of flugistan from the mercury for if the process consisted only in the expulsion of flugistan how could heating what remained produce exceedingly pure ordinary air it seemed necessary to suppose that not only was flugistan expelled from mercury during calcination but that the mercury also imbibed some portion and that's the purest portion of the surrounding air priestly 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 flugistan by the mercury and the gain by the de-flugisticated mercury of the property of yielding exceedingly pure or de-flugisticated air when it was heated very strongly priestly 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 protion principle of flugistan was always at hand and by skillful 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 flugistan 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 to climb steep hills requires slow pace at first 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 realized 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 today 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 labor 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 Lauren Lavoisier was born in Paris in 1743 his father who was emergent 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 21 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 six 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 with a stopper of glass he cleaned dried and weighed this vessel then he put into it rainwater 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 degrees or 40 degrees below that of boiling water for 101 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 and 4 tenths 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 four and nine tenths 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 twelve and a half grains less than the weight of the material removed from the vessel but some of the material which was removed from the vessel might remain 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 and a half grains Lavoisier had obtained four and nine tenths plus 15 and a half which equals 20 and two-fifths grains of solid the pelican had lost 17 and two-fifths grains the difference between these weights namely three 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 Ray regarded the increase in weight as the result of the combination of the air with the metal Mayo 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 Ray or that of Mayo Lavoisier made a series of experiments the results for 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 in rushing air was exactly equal to the difference between the weights of the tin and the calcs formed by calcining the tin Lavoisier concluded that the calcined 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 experiment 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 the metal in the process of calcination he proposed to cause a metallic calcs 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 priestly visited Paris saw Lavoisier and told him of the new air he had obtained by heating calcined mercury Lavoisier saw the great importance of priestly's discovery he repeated priestly's experiment and concluded that the air or gas which he refers to in his laboratory journal as l'air de flugistique de monsieur priestly 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. Meo's supposition was confirmed. 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 flogiston was destroyed and with its destruction the whole alchemical apparatus of principles and elements, essences and qualities, souls and spirits, disappeared.