Transmutation Of Metals Research Articles

Anonymous on Alchemy, Aristotle, and Creation: An Unedited Thirteenth-Century Text

Around the year 1200 there appeared a Latin translation of Pseudo-Aristotle's De mineralibus, in which the author denied the possibility of the transmutation of metals. This statement, especially when placed in the mouth of the revered Aristotle, was a severe blow to the aim of the alchemists. Indeed it had been Aristotle's theory of the generation of metals in his Meteorologica and his theory of a common origin of all metals that had encouraged the alchemists in their efforts to transmute base metals into gold. This pseudo-Aristotelian challenge to the truth of alchemy seems to have elicited at least one previously unrecognized response. In a short treatise, tucked away in a sixteenth-century manuscript of alchemical miscellany, an anonymous author quotes “Aristotle” saying that the species of metals cannot be transformed or transmuted, but includes the proviso, also taken from Aristotle: unless they be reduced to their primary matter. This materia prima is identified by our author as the moistness that comes from water, water whose creative power our author grounds in Holy Scripture, especially in the hexaemeral tradition of the story of creation from the book of Genesis.

Alchemy and the Renaissance Commentary Tradition on Meteorologica IV

It has been well noted that Aristotle's Meteorologica IV has played an important role in the development of alchemy because of its quasi-corpuscularian doctrines and its treatments of art and nature. This paper uncovers to what extent Renaissance commentaries on this book took into account alchemy. Many Renaissance commentators such as Agostino Nifo, Lodovico Boccadiferro and Cesare Cremonini were sceptical of the possibility of the transmutation of metals and limited their discussions to what they found in medieval commentaries. Several scholars, however, noted the utility of this book towards alchemy. By the middle of the seventeenth century, two commentators intertwined their interpretations with alchemy. Girolamo Trimarchi, following the Jesuit commentary tradition, considered this work primarily with respect to alchemy; and Niccolò Cabeo utilised alchemical experiments to guide his reading of the text and make Aristotle's work relevant to the emerging experimental natural philosophy.

Systems of Metals in Alchemy

Two distinct ways of ordering of the seven ancient metals, denoted as System I and II in this paper, can be found in alchemical sources. In System I metals are arranged with gold in the central position: lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, mercury, silver. This arrangement bears resemblance with Ptolemaic system of planets which could have contributed to the origin of this System. Symmetrical positions of the pairs lead-silver and iron-copper with respect to the central, gold-Sun were supported by practical observations. More widespread System II arranges metals from the least to the most precious ones. In this system gold is always the last member of the series. The ordering of base metals in System II has only one typical feature: in most cases iron precedes copper. Therefore attention was paid to redox deposition of copper from cupric solutions on metallic iron. This reaction was important support of claims that transmutation of metals is possible. Further redox depositions mentioned in alchemical and chemical works are also discussed with special attention paid to the influence of impurities on resulting process. One reaction described in alchemical manuscript was repeated in laboratory to show the possible approach chosen by alchemist.

Assaying Robert BoyleThe Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest: Including Boyle's "Lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals. Lawrence M. Principe

In a work of stunning scholarship, Lawrence Principe offers a significantly revisionist interpretation of one of the canonical figures of the Scientific Revolution, Robert Boyle. In place of the standard Boyle who championed mechanism by breaking from the earlier learning of the alchemists, Principe offers another Boyle, a man who spent decades carefully studying alchemical texts and patiently pursuing in his chemical laboratories the philosophers' stone and the manufacture of gold from baser elements. How have Boyle scholars, including Marie Boas Hall, Thomas Kuhn, George Sarton, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer, managed to miss out on such a Boyle? How did Principe uncover this undetected side of Boyle? Much of the answer to the first question lies in the insistently narrow focus of earlier scholars on Boyle's activities in the 1660s, the early years of the Royal Society. Moreover, earlier scholars have shown a penchant for examining Boyle's printed works, supplementing these only with Thomas Birch's eighteenth-century, incomplete, and highly expurgated version of Boyle's correspondence. Principe, in contrast, comes to his task of rehabilitating our image of Boyle as an actively engaged alchemist armed with an astonishing array of archival and manuscript sources. Ile has spent years poring over the Boyle papers at the Royal Society, now catalogued and available on microfilm (Antonio Clericuzio and Michael Hunter are editing the complete surviving correspondence, and Hunter and Edward Davis are preparing a new edition of the complete works, the first since 1772). In a scholarly tour de force, Principe has pieced together a new text of Boyle's Transmutation of Metals, which he has patiently reconstructed from some twenty surviving fragments. This text, presented as an appendix to the book, provides irrefutable new evidence that Boyle did not reject alchemy, as earlier historians have claimed, but maintained traditional alchemical principles and actively pursued alchemical experiments over his lifetime. On the basis of careful study of the Boyle manuscripts, Principe argues convincingly that Boyle not only took careful reading notes on earlier alchemical authors but also recorded his own experimental trials on transmutation. Only a scholar of Herculean strength and Sisyphean patience would have dared to tackle the alchemical notes in the

The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest, Including Boyle's "Lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals (review)

The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest, Including Boyle's "Lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals (review)

The aspiring adept: Robert Boyle and his alchemical quest: including Boyle's "lost" Dialogue on the transmutation of metals

AcknowledgmentsNote on Primary SourcesAbbreviationsIntroductionAlchemy and Chemistry: A Crucial Note on Terminology and CategoriesCh. IBoyle SpagyricizedCh. IISkeptical of the Sceptical ChymistCh. IIIThe Dialogue on Transmutation, Kinds of Transmutations, and Boyle's BeliefsCh. IVAdepti, Aspirants, and CheatsCh. VBoyle and Alchemical PracticeCh. VIMotivations: Truth, Medicine, and ReligionEpilogue: A New Boyle and a New AlchemyApp. 1Robert Boyle's Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of MetalsApp. 2Interview Accounts of Transmutation and Prefaces to Boyle's Other Chrysopoetic WritingsApp. 3Dialogue on the Converse with Angels Aided by the Philosophers' StoneWorks CitedIndex

Alchemy vs. chemistry: the etymological origins of a historiographic mistake.

The parallel usage of the two terms "alchemy" and "chemistry" by seventeenth-century writers has engendered considerable confusion among historians of science. Many historians have succumbed to the temptation of assuming that the early modern term "chemistry" referred to something like the modern discipline, while supposing that "alchemy" pertained to a different set of practices and beliefs, predominantly the art of transmuting base metals into gold. This paper provides the first exhaustive analysis of the two terms and their interlinguistic cognates in the seventeenth century. It demonstrates that the intentional partition of the two terms with the restriction of alchemy to the sense of metallic transmutation was not widely accepted until the end of the seventeenth century, if even then. The major figure in the restriction of meaning, Nicholas Lemery, built on a spurious interpretation of the Arabic definite article al, which he inherited from earlier sources in the chemical textbook tradition. In order to curtail the tradition of anachronism and distortion engendered by the selective use of the terms "alchemy" and "chemistry" by historians, the authors conclude by suggesting a return to seventeenth-century terminology for discussing the different aspects of the early modern discipline "chymistry."

Alchimie, philosophie corpusculaire et minéralogie dans la Metallographia de John Webster/Alchemy, corpuscular philosophy and mineralogy in the John Webster's "Metallographia"

SUMMARY. — The Metallographia (1671) of John Webster (1611-1682) is a valuable contribution to seventeenth-century science of metals. It is based on an impressive number of texts of mineralogy and alchemy and is aimed at stimulating mineralogical research and the exploitation of English mines. In Webster's Metallographia metallurgy and mineralogy are strictly linked to alchemical theories of the generation and transmutation of metals. Webster's work contains a synthesis of alchemical theories, Helmontian chemistry and Boyle's corpuscular philosophy.

Australian Broadcasting Commission — Guest of Honour

As you have just heard, I am an archaeologist. Now, some people have the idea that archaeology deals with things so remote, that they could never possibly have any relevance to our present-day lives. But this, I assure you, is not so. Actually, the modern nuclear physicists, for example, who are achieving the transmutation of metals, owe more to the successful practice of metal workers in the archaeologists' Bronze Age, than to the learned theories of Babylonian or Egyptian alchemists and their medieval disciplines in the so-called historical eras. For the Bronze Age metal workers smelted the blue-green crystalline ores of copper, and so reduced them to the tough, reddish metal, and this was the prototype of all the chemical and nuclear changes now deliberately controlled by man. And don't forget that this startling change was regularly brought about, before anyone had devised a system of writing to record the smelters' formulae.

Dismantling the Canterbury Book

Although several Chaucer scholars have argued for the last four tales of theCanterbury Talesas a concluding sequence, it has not been generally recognized that Chaucer ends his book deliberately and skillfully beginning with the Second Nun's Tale. Through the concluding stories Chaucer disengages himself and his audience from the fiction making of theTales, moving toward his own voice in the Retraction, and he introduces themes of transformation in tales concerning the conversion of souls (Second Nun), the transmutation of metals through alchemy (Canon's Yeoman), the metamorphosis of Apollo's crow (Manciple), and the transforming powers of contrition and penitence (Parson, Retraction). The consistency of these closure themes provides evidence for the authority of the Ellesmere manuscript as against the highly regarded and recently published Hengwrt manuscript of theTales, which has a different concluding tale order and which does not contain the Canon's Yeoman's Tale.

Transmutation of metals

Transmutation of metals

Chaston Chapman Gift to the University of Leeds

IN 1933 Mrs. Chaston Chapman presented to the University of Leeds her late husband's extensive working library of modern books on chemistry, together with complete runs of a large number of periodicals. Mrs. Chaston Chapman has now presented his collection of works on alchemy to the University of Leeds, where they are housed in the Brotherton Library. There is a small section of French books and a more extensive section of English books. Noteworthy among the latter are “The Mirror of Alchimy, Composed by the thrice-famous and learned Fryer, Roger Bachon”, London, 1597; the rare “Secrets Reveal'd: or, An open entrance to the Shut-Palace of the King: Containing The greatest Treasure in Chymistry, Never yet so plainly Discovered”, 1669; Plat, “The Jewel House of Art and Nature”, 1653; and many other rare works. Translations into English include Geber, “The Works of Geber, the most famous Arabian prince and philosopher”, 1678; Beguin, “Tyro-cinium Chymicum”, 1669; Paracelsus, “The Chym-ical Transmutation of Metals”, 1657; Glauber, “The Golden Ass Well Managed”, 1670; Gesner, “The newe lewell of Health”, 1576; Le Febure, “A compleat Body of Chymistry”, 1670; the 1677 and 1686 translations of Lemery, “A Course of Chymistry” and “New Curiosities in Art and Nature”, 1711, by the same author.

Union Académique Internationale Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland dating from before the XVI Century

Union Académique Internationale Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland dating from before the XVI Century

Calendar of Discovery and Invention

January 23, 17I0.—Johann Friedrich Bdttger, the German alchemist, was born in 1682 and died in 1719. Apprenticed to a chemist of Berlin named Zorn, he experimented with zest with the view of the transmutation of metals into gold. From Berlin he went to Dresden, and it was while under the patronage of the Elector of Saxony that he accidentally discovered the process of making porcelain from the reddish clay found in the neighbourhood of Meissen, and on Jan. 23, 1710, the first European porcelain factory was opened at that place.

Chinese Alchemy

IT is generally agreed that chemistry had its origin about the first century A.D. at Alexandria, where the Egyptian metallurgical and technical arts combined with speculative philosophy and theosophy to form a belief in the possibility of the transmutation of metals into gold. On the conquest of Egypt by the Arabs in A.D. 640 this knowledge passed to Arabia, largely through the intermediary of Syriac translations of the Greek treatises. Arabic chemistry is not earlier than the seventh-eighth century A.D. and appears to be greatly dependent upon that borrowed from Alexandria.

The Seven Follies of Science: a Popular Account of the most famous Scientific Impossibilities and the Attempts which have been Made to Solve Them

THESE “Follies” are the squaring of the circle, the duplication of the cube, the trisection of an angle, perpetual motion, the transmutation of metals, the fixation of mercury, and the elixir of life; we miss from this list the flattening of the earth. The author is an American; he writes for ordinary readers, and makes his subject interesting; he seems to make no mistakes. He dwells at much greater length upon the first and fourth of the follies than the rest. In addition to these seven classical ones he gives an account of four others: perpetual lamps, the alkahest or universal solvent, palingenesy (the revival of a plant or animal from its ashes), and the powder of sympathy. He adds a division on the fourth dimension of space and some paradoxes, micrography, illusions of the senses, and two tricks. The book finishes with an account of some arithmetical problems and the fulcrum of Archimedes which are probably “curious” to the ordinary reader. The Seven Follies of Science: a Popular Account of the most famous Scientific Impossibilities and the Attempts which have been Made to Solve Them. By John Phin. Pp. viii + 178. (London: Archibald Constable and Co., Ltd., 1906.) Price 5s. net.

Famous Scientific Workshops: I.—Lord Kelvin's Laboratory in the University of Glasgow

AS Lord Kelvin stated nearly twelve years ago, in an address at the opening of the Physical and Chemical Laboratories at the University College of North Wales, the establishment of scientific laboratories at universities and colleges for the experimental training of students is a comparatively recent idea. Private laboratories, no doubt, existed at a very early period. The old alchemists had places, sometimes secret retreats, meanly appointed, like the den of Wayland Smith, sometimes, when the purse and protection of a powerful patron were at their command, more luxurious quarters, in which they carried on their search for the elixir of life, and the key to the transmutation of metals.

On the Study of Science in Schools*

On the Study of Science in Schools*

Transmutation of metals

Transmutation of metals