Boyle, Robert Sceptical Chymist

Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (New York, Everyman ed., 1949), i5- Carneades speaking. 

Robert Boyle, Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661) The Producibleness of Chymical Principles (Oxford, 1680) Experiments, Notes, c. About the Mechanical Origine or Production of Divers Particular Qualities (London, 1675). On Boyle s Sceptical Chymist and his critique of chymical principles, see Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1998), 27-62 and Debus, Fire Analysis. ... 

The Gold and Silver of this fable represent false alchemists they suffer equally from ignorance and hubris. In contrast, the Philosopher s Stone is the True Adept—a natural philosopher pursuing truth and seeking the wisdom of God. He is the proto-scientist whose experimentation and reasoning will one day lead to a true chemical science. Or, does he somehow presage the birth of Robert Boyle, the Sceptical Chymist of our next essay ... 

Partington, A Short History of Chemistry (n. 2), 48-9. For tree-growing experiment, see 51-2. Boyle attempted a parallel experiment, successfully growing a Squash or Pompion (marrow or cucumber) in similarly des-sicated soil using only water Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist or Chymico-Physical Doubts and Paradoxes, London, 1661, 107-9. 

R. Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist or Chymico-Physical Doubts Paradoxes, touching the Spagylist s Principles commonly call d Hypostatical, as they are wont to be Propos d and Defended by the Generality ofAlchymists, London, 1661. Reprinted in the Everyman Series. See also T. Birch, Life of Boyle, Works, 1744 and L. M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest, Princeton University Press, Boston, 2000. 

The science of chemistry languished until Robert Boyle—a brilliant, fanatically religious man—wrote The Sceptical Chymist in 1661. He gave scientists a new way of seeing the world by defining an element as any substance that could not be broken down into a simpler substance, an idea that closely coincides with todays notion of an element. Boyles insight led chemists into their labs, where they heated solids and evaporated liquids and analyzed the gases that boiled off and the residues that remained behind. They isolated a flood of new elements. 

Boyle, Robert. The sceptical chymist. Everyman Library. 1661 reprint, 1964 or 65. 

In 1661 Robert Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, a book in which he discussed the criteria by which one can decide whether a substance is or is not a chemical element. He concluded that the four Aristotelian elements and three principles commonly accepted in his time cannot be real chemical elements since they can neither compose nor be... 

Robert Boyle stated in 1661, in his Sceptical Chymist, drat sal ammoniac is composed of muriatic (hydrochloric) acid and the volatile alkali (ammonia) and told how to separate the urinous and common salts (27). In 1716 Geoffroy the Younger demonstrated the composition of sal ammoniac and prepared it by sublimation (28, 29). In the same year, the Jesuit missionary Father Sicard described its preparation at Dam ire or Damayer, one mile from die City of El Mansura in the Nile Delta. In twenty-five large laboratories and several smaller ones, it was sublimed in glass vessels from die soot of die burned dung of camels and cows, to which, he said, had been added salt and urine. Lemere, the French consul at Cairo, described die process in 1719 for the Academy of Sciences in Paris, but made no mention of salt or urine (29, 30, 31). 

Boyle, Robert, The Sceptical Chymist, J. M Dent and Sons, London... 

See Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept. Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, New Jersey Princeton University Press, 1998). This provides a reading of The Sceptical Chymist that is distinctly sympathetic toward alchemy. 

Alkahest. He also blamed the Galenists for resisting the progress of medicine by their obstinate conservatism. Robert Boyle manifestly considered Sennert one of the chief exponents of the theory of the three principles and cites him in the Sceptical Chymist. 

However, that is not to say the art was no longer practiced Charles II had an alchemical laboratory set up beneath the royal bedchamber, and Robert Boyle, although publicly repudiating alchemy in his book The Sceptical Chymist, still practised the art in secret. And in 1672, there was elected to the Royal Society a man who has come to be regarded as the greatest scientist of all time, yet who was also a practising alchemist Sir Isaac Newton. 

Chemists A Study of The Sceptical Chymist and Its Impact on Seventeenth-Century Chemistry, in Robert Boyle Reconsidered, ed. Hunter) discerns Boyle s willingness to leave alchemy in the realm of darkness while trying to forge a respectable discourse of chemistry, while Principe pitches for Boyle s sincere affection for alchemical adept and their secrets which stood above the vulgar doctrines of textbook writers see also Principe, The Aspiring Adept, 49. 

Robert Boyle, Experiments and Notes about the Producibleness of Chymical Principles, being Parts of an Appendix designed to be added to The Sceptical Chymist, Works, volume 1, 587-661. Boyle s continuing preoccupation with the problem of principles can be discerned in Of the Imperfection of the Chemists Doctrine of Qualities (1675), in Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle, ed. M. Stewart (Manchester University Press, 1979). This work recapitulated more succinctly and powerfully his earlier criticisms in The Sceptical Chymist. 

Clericuzio, Antonio. Carneades and the Chemists A Study of The Sceptical Chymist and Its Impact on Seventeenth-Century Chemistry. In Robert Boyle Reconsidered, ed. M. Hunter (Cambridge University Press, 1994). 

This atomic theory didn t attract too many followers over the next 2,000 years or so. However, in the 1600s and 1700s, early chemists began publishing the results of experiments that they were carrying out. Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647) experimented with air pressure. Robert Boyle (1627-1691) discovered and published his gas law, which we will study in Chapter 8. In 1661, Robert Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, which argued the virtues of an atomic theory. 

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