Lull, Ramon, pseudo

Pereira, Michela. Vegetare seu Transmutare The Vegetable Soul and Pseudo-Lullian Alchemy, in Fernando Dominguez Reboiras et al., eds., Arbor Scientiae Der Baum des Wissens von Ramon Lull (Brepols Turnhout, 2002). 

There are only two modem book-length studies of alchemy in Russian they are by the same author and are concerned with alchemy as a cultural phenomenon without reference to alchemy in Russia. Modem general histories of Russian science which include some history of chemistry have for the most part, until recently, avoided alchemy as a pseudo-science , more to be condemned as a western aberration than examined historically. Rainov s standard history of science in Russia up to the seventeenth century has no entry in the index for alchemy at all, although he does not ignore the subject entirely the Academy of Sciences standard history of Russian science denies, probably correctly, that Russian craftsmen ever engaged in alchemy or that there is any evidence for the existence of alchemy in Russia before the fifteenth century and Kuzakov in a recent work correctly notes that some non-alchemical works of what he calls, without further comment, the West European alchemists - Albertus Magnus, Ramon Lull and Michael Scot were known in seventeenth-century Russia but incorrectly states, as we shall see, that not a single alchemical treatise in Russian is known. 

The first mention of nitric acid is in Pseudo-Geber s Inventione Veritatis, wherein it is obtained by calcining a mixture of niter, alum and blue vitriol. It was again described by Albert the Great in the 13th century and by Ramon Lull, who prepared it by heating niter and clay and called it "eau forte" (aqua fortis). 

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