Lemery, Nicholas

Lemery, Nicholas. A COURSE OF Chymistry. CONTAINING An easie method of preparing those Chymical Medicins which are used in PHYSICK. WITH Curious remarks and Useful Discourses upon each Preparation, for the Benefit of such who desire to be instructed in the Knowledge of this ART. The Second Edition very much Inlarged Translated from the Fifth Edition in the French, By WALTER HARRIS, M.D. Fellow of the College of Physicians. London Printed by R.N. for Walter Kettilby, at the Bishop s Head in S. Pauls Church-yard, 1686. 

Lemery, Nicholas. Modem curiosities of art and nature. London Matthew Gillflower, 1685. 

Lemery, Nicholas. A course of chymistry. London Walter Kettilby, 1698. 

Lemery, Nicholas. 1698. A Course of Chymistry. London For Walter KettUby. -------. 1685. Modern Curiosities of Art and Nature. London For Matthew... 

Powers, John C. Ars Sine Arte Nicholas Lemery and the end of alchemy in eighteenth-century France. Ambix 45, no. 3 (Nov 1998) 163-189. 

No chymist after Le Fevre dealt so fully with the spiritual aspects of the universal spirit and its interaction with the matrices, but their language makes it clear that their thoughts are still working within this same spiritual frame, well into the eighteenth century, especially in the influential work of Nicholas Lemery. 

The climax of French iatrochymistry was the work of Nicholas Lemery, whose Cours de chymie of 1675 will be treated in Chapter Three. But two other chymists of the mid-century deserve comment. Le Fevre identified them as The subtil van Helmont, and the laborious Glauber, the two Beacons and Lights which we are to follow in the Theory of Chymistry, and the best practice of it. These two, Johann Glauber and Joan Baptista van Helmont, are significant exceptions to the textbooks tradition of seventeenth century chemistry. Both maintained an extraordinary emphasis on experimental observations, even while returning to mystical philosophical positions. 

In this account I have emphasized Boyles critical role in refuting the philosophical chemical systems of his time. As we shall see shortly in the work of Nicholas Lemery, Boyle was not totally successful in eliminating either the concepts or their vocabulary of the chemical systems he criticized. Indeed, many of the most traditional concepts survived to the end of the next century. 

In the first edition of his textbook, Nicholas Lemery used the Paracel-sian idea that salts were formed in the various matrices of the earth where the universal acid found them when trickling down from above. This idea was made more specific in later editions ... 

Wilhelm Homberg, in a 1702 memoir on the general principles of chemistry, describes the sulphur principle as always active in its nature. On the other hand, the earth never acts but serves only as a recepticle or matrix for the other principles. Here very clearly expressed is the verbal connection between the matrix as womb in the earth (as instrument), and EARTH as an element or principle. There is a continuous linguistic and conceptual connection between the matrix of Paracelsus and the base of Rouelle. As Louis Lemery, a son of Nicholas Lemery, put it in 1706 ... 

Only a few naturally occurring salts were known to the chemists of the early eighteenth century chief among them were the vitriols, alum, and saltpeter. Borax was another that gained some attention in the early decades of the eighteenth century, though no one seemed to know how to relate it to familiar forms of matter. Nicholas Lemery in 1703 recognized it as a neutral salt by its failure to produce any fermentation when treated with several acids and diflFerent alkali salts. From these the inference was clear that borax itself was neither acid nor alkali and was therefore a neutral salt. But Lemery was not able to identify either the alkali or the acid that made up this curious salt. The alkali was identified shortly thereafter, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that the nature of the acid component of borax was identified. 

Nicholas Lemery, A Course of Chemistry, 3rd English ed. (London, 1698), 357. 

Pierre-Joseph Macquers Elemens de chimie th orique, (1749) and Elemens de chimie practique (1751) became the first significant French successor to Nicholas Lemerys Cours de chymie, first published in 1675. Unlike earlier works it was an attempt to offer chemistry for its own sake, independent of medicine. It was intended for the absolute Novice in Chymistry to lead him from the most simple truths. .. to the most complex. Hence he begins with the elements, then moves on to saline substances (acids, alkalies, and their combinations) the volatile sulphureous spirit, sulphur, phosphorus, and the neutral salts, which have an earth or a fixed alkali for their bases. Then on to the metals, which are scarcely more compounded than the saline ... 

The key to this system lies in the recognition that components by which compound bodies are named must be simple bodies or considered as simple rather than elements in the ultimate meaning of that term. This was not the first time Guyton had made the distinction between the philosophical and operational components. Only a few years earlier in his Elemens de chemie, he had carefully identified the ultimate, metaphysical components, the earth, water, air, and fire, as the natural elements, and the more operational ones as chemical elements.The latter, though presumably composed of the natural elements, were still simple according to art for it has not yet been possible to separate their principles. Nor was Guyton the first to make this kind of distinction. In the late seventeenth century Nicholas Lemery had written... 

Nicholas Lemery, Remarks upon Principles, in Course of Chemistry, 2nd English edition (London, 1686), 5-6. This passage is not in the first English edition. 

Nicholas Lemery (1645-1715 CE) was a corpuscularian who favored a five-element theory (water, spirit, oil, salt, and earth). His acid/alkali theory invoked spikes on an acid that interacted with the pores of the base. In 1675 CE in Paris, he published Cours de Chymie, a textbook that was translated into English, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish and was popular for more than fifty years. In this book, he espoused the Cartesian corpuscular mechanism (45). 

Porter, Theodore. The Promotion of Mining and the Advancement of Science The Chemical Revolution of Mineralogy. Annals of Science 38,1981, 543-570. Powers, John C. Ars since arte Nicholas Lemery and the End of Alchemy in... 

Boerhaave described a process of natural circulation in order to explain how the spiritus rector lodges itself in a natural body. This process is comparable with the process of natural circulation as described by Nicholas Lefebvre in Lefebvre, N. (1664). A Compkat Body of Chemistry. London and by Nicholas Lemery in Lemery, N. (1696). Cours de Chymie. Paris. 

Newman and Principe, Alchemy vs. Chemistry. See also John C. Powers, Ars sine arte Nicholas Lemery and the End of Alchemy in Eighteenth-Century France, Ambix 45, 1998, 163-89. 

Observations that some flowers provided no essential oils on steam distillation Nicholas Lemery... 

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