Alchemy and the Dawn of Chemistry

How is it then, that we nevertheless can see alchemy as the dawn of modem chemistry It has to do with the fact that the alchemists were the first to set up real chemical laboratories in which they worked out many of the basic methods that are still used in modern chemistry. Furthermore, alchemy represented all the knowledge of inorganic chemistry at the time and must have played a significant role in the development of metallurgic processes used in the economically... 

Early twenty-first-century historians of alchemy and chemistry now have demonstrated how much alchemical ideas were involved in the early modern experimental science of the seventeenth century, including that of Boyle himself, as well as Newton and George Starkey. Starkey was an experimental chemist who was the author of the important alchemical text The Marrow of Alchemy (1654-55), published under the name Eirenaeus Philoponus Philalethes, and held to be of great alchemical importance by Waite and Golden Dawn alchemists. See Newman and Principe 2004, and Principe 1998. 

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