Elements of the alchemists

The alchemists never succeeded in making gold from base metals, yet their experiments, recorded under a mystical and intentionally obscure terminology, gradually revealed metallic arsenic and antimony. Bismuth was discovered by practical miners. Finally, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the pale light of phosphorus began to illumine the dark secrets of alchemy and to disclose the steady advance of scientific chemistry. 

From dire disease ofttimes direct them  

That you faithfully keep watchful guard over me  

The so-called arsenic of the Greeks and Romans consisted of the poisonous sulfides, orpiment and sandarac, mined with heavy loss of life by slave labor (2). Both Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides were familiar with orpiment and realgar (sandarac) (70). The latter mentioned that Arsenicum and Sandaracha occur in the same mines, that sandarac has a brimstone-like odor, and that these two ores are roasted in the same manner (71). 

Signor Marcello Muccioli published in Archeion an article on the knowledge of arsenic possessed by the Chinese in about 1600, as exhibited in the Pen Ts ao Kan-Mu (or Kang-mu), a 52-volume encyclopedia on materia medica (37). Yoshio Mikami states that this work 

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Salt was one of Paracelsus tria prima. Like the other principles and the four elements of the alchemists, salt as principle took its qualities as well as its name from the material bodies with the same properties. In a fire analysis, salt was to be found in the non-volatile residue and extracted from the non-soluble earth by water. This real salt demonstrated the more or less universal presence of the salt principle in all such bodies. The presence of SALT as principle accounted for the body s solidity and resistance to fire. In its material manifestation, it was recognized by its solubility and its saline taste. 

Sibum remind us, after all, the persona is "a cultural identity that simultaneously shapes the individual in body and mind and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy."93 It remains, then, for us to understand how the elements of the alchemist s persona I have outlined here shaped the lives of both the alchemists who had to inhabit it and the expectations of the patrons who hired them. 

Besant also highlighted, for instance, Professor Darwin s claim to the British Association at Cape Town that Although even the dissociative stage of the alchemistic problem still lay beyond the power of the chemist, yet, modern researches seemed to furnish a sufficiently clear idea of the structure of atoms to enable them to see what would have to be done to effect a transformation of the elements ([Besant] 1905, 2). 

Chemistry as distinct from Alchemy and iatro-chemistry commenced with Robert Boyle (see plate 15), who first clearly recognised that its aim is neither the transmutation of the metals nor the preparation of medicines, but the observation and generalisation of a certain class of phenomena who denied the validity of the alchemistic view of the constitution of matter, and enunciated the definition of an element which has since reigned supreme in Chemistry and who enriched the science with observations of the utmost importance. Boyle, however, was a man whose ideas were in advance of his times, and intervening between the iatro-chemical period and the Age of Modem Chemistry proper came the period of the Phlogistic Theory — a theory which had a certain affinity with the ideas of the alchemists. 

The so-called moralizing subtext is not buried, but rather, quite evident in many depictions of the alchemist. Like the urine-analysis genre, the alchemist in his laboratory is a popular theme in Dutch seventeenth-century art. In general, various elements of this type engage in the art of describing [the everyday], in Svetlana Alpers s influential terms, and yet... 

The language of the alchemists was, therefore, rich in such expressions as these "the elements are to be so conjoined that the nobler and fuller life may be produced" "our arcanum is gold exalted to the highest degree of perfection to which the combined action of nature and art can develop it."... 

Although it appears to me impossible to translate the sayings of the alchemists concerning Elements and Principles into expressions which shall have definite and exact meanings for us to-day, still we may, perhaps, get an inkling of the meaning of such sentences as those I have quoted from Basil Valentine and Philalethes. 

Most of the alchemists taught that the elements produced what they called seed, by their mutual reactions, and the principles matured this seed and brought it to perfection. They supposed that each class, or kind, of things had its own seed, and that to obtain the seed was to have the power of producing the things which sprung from that seed. 

The primary classification of substances made by the alchemists was expressed by saying these substances are rich in the principle sulphur, those contain much of the principle mercury, and this class is marked by the preponderance of the principle salt. The secondary classification of the alchemists was expressed by saying this class is characterised by dryness, that by moisture, another by coldness, and a fourth by hotness the dry substances contain much of the element Earth, the moist substances are rich in the element Water, in the cold substances the element Air preponderates, and the hot substances contain more of the element than of the other elements. 

The results of the experimental examination of the compositions and properties of substances, made since the time of the alchemists, have led to the modem conception of the chemical element, and the isolation of about seventy or eighty different elements. No substance now called an element has been produced in the laboratory by uniting two, or more, distinct substances, nor has any been separated into two, or more, unlike portions. The only decided change which a chemical element has been caused to undergo is the combination of it with some other element or elements, or with a compound or compounds. 

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