ENGLISH ALCHEMISTS

Holmyard, Eric John. Two English alchemists George Ripley and Thomas Norton. Aryan Path 4, no. 8 (Aug 1933) 552-555. 

Sutherland, A. "English alchemists before the sixteenth century." MSc thesis, London Univ, 1930. 

Armytage, R.N. Green-. Miles Blomefield, English alchemist (1525-1574). Times Lit Suppl (5 Nov 1925). 

Extracted from his Alchemy rediscovered and restored (1940). Contents The alchemists Chinese alchemy Egyptian alchemy Arabian alchemy European alchemy The English alchemists Alchemy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries... 

Includes The Ladder of Souls-Studies the mystery of the descent of the spiritual man into the body, further enhanced with the diagrams of Robert Fludd, an English Alchemist and Hermetic philosopher... 

Bacon,Rog r (1214 -1292). An English alchemist, considered to be one of the inventors of a compn similar to black powder. Made numerous other contributions in various branches of science... 

Helvetius s reputation was hardly tarnished by his admission that he believed he had achieved transmutation. The same, however, cannot be said for the English alchemist, scientist and Royal Society Fellow, James Price. 

Around 1450, the English alchemist George Ripley called this distillate the Blessed Liquor or Menstruum Foetens and describes it as containing three substances ... 

Because the alchemist needed many different intensities of heat for his various operations, he had to have many furnaces of different sizes. Regulating heat was always a great problem. Thomas Norton, an English alchemist of the 15th century, is said to have invented dampers to regulate the heat of the furnace. 

Right a section of the first Ripley Scrowle, produced in Liiheck in 1589, part of the papers of the English alchemist George Ripley. At the top are shown the seven processes of the alchemist, who is portrayed as a monk Each is linked to the whole Work, shown as a red essence of the Stone. 

Anthony Gross, George Ripley , Oxford DNB. Also Antrobus, Practical aspects. .. (n. 5), 17, 20. For the names, dates, and manuscript locations of Antrobus s 129 English alchemists, see his Index of medieval English alchemists born before 1540 , thesis. Appendix 116-20. 

However, although absolute alcohol is indeed eflective for extracting plant essences, its effectiveness is limited. In the late fifteenth century, the English alchemist George Ripley rejected quintessence of wine of the kind described by Raymond in the Liber de secretis. Apparently on the basis of his own experience, he observed that even multiple distillations fail to produce a quintessence sharp enough to dissolve metallic calxes ... 

Although the most famous of the Philalethan works is the Introitus, this work has more the character of an extended riddle than that of an alchemical theorica. As Philalethes says in his commentary to the fifteenth-century English alchemist George Ripley,... 

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