 Chapter 1 of the story of Alchemy It is neither religious nor wise to judge that of which you know nothing, from a brief guide to the celestial ruby by Philolathe's 17th century. Preface. The story of Alchemy and the beginnings of chemistry is very interesting in itself. It is also a pregnant example of the contrast between the scientific and the emotional methods of regarding nature, and it admirably illustrates the differences between well-grounded suggestive hypotheses and baseless speculations. I have tried to tell the story so that it may be intelligible to the ordinary reader. M. M. Paterson Muir, Cambridge, November 1902. Chapter 1. The Explanation of Material Changes Given by the Greek Thinkers For thousands of years before men had any accurate and exact knowledge of the changes of material things, they had thought about these changes, regarded them as revelations of spiritual truths, built on them theories of things in heaven and earth, and a good many things in neither, and used them in manufacturers, arts and handicrafts, especially in one very curious manufacture wherein not the thousandth fragment of a grain of the finished article was ever produced. The accurate and systematic study of the changes which material things undergo is called chemistry. We may perhaps describe alchemy as the superficial and what may be called subjective examination of these changes, and the speculative systems and imaginary arts and manufacturers founded on that examination. We are assured by many old writers that Adam was the first alchemist, and we are told by one of the initiated that Adam was created on the sixth day, being the fifteenth of March, of the first year of the world. Certainly alchemy had a long life, or chemistry did not begin until about the middle of the eighteenth century. No branch of science has had so long a period of incubation as chemistry. There must be some extraordinary difficulty in the way of disentangling the steps of those changes wherein substances of one kind are produced from substances totally unlike them. To inquire how those of acute intellects and much learning regarded such occurrences in the times when man's outlook on the world was very different from what it is now what's to be interesting.