BY
Chemistry was born yesterday: barely a hundred years ago it took the form of a modern science. However, the rapid progress it has made since has contributed, more perhaps than that of any other science, to transforming industry and material civilization, and to giving the human race its daily increasing power over nature. . This is enough to say what interest the history of the beginnings of chemistry presents. Now these have a very special character: chemistry is not a primitive science, like geometry or astronomy; it was constituted on the debris of a previous scientific formation; half-chimerical and half-positive formation, itself founded on the slowly amassed treasure of the practical discoveries of metallurgy, medicine, industry and home economics. This is alchemy, which claimed both to enrich its followers by teaching them to make gold and silver, to protect them from disease by preparing the panacea, and finally to provide them with happiness. perfect in identifying them with the soul of the world and the universal spirit. The history of alchemy is very obscure. It is a science without apparent root, which suddenly manifests itself at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire and which develops throughout the Middle Ages, in the midst of mysteries and symbols, without leaving the state of occult and persecuted doctrine: scholars and philosophers mingle there and merge with the hallucinated, the charlatans and sometimes even with the scoundrels. This story deserves to be approached in all its extent by the methods of modern criticism. Without undertaking such vast research, which would require a lifetime as a scholar, I would like to try to pierce the mystery of the origins of alchemy and show by what links it is linked both to the industrial processes of the ancient Egyptians, to the speculative theories of the philosophers Greeks and the mystical reveries of the Alexandrians and Gnostics. Mystical origins. The scriptures report that there are some kind of demons having dealings with women. Hermès talked about it in his nature books. The ancient and holy scriptures say that certain angels, in love with women, descended to earth, taught them the works of nature; and because of this they were cast out of heaven and condemned to perpetual exile. From this trade was born the race of giants. The book in which they taught the arts is called chêma: hence the name chêma applied to the art par excellence. Thus spoke Zosimus the Panopolitan, the oldest of the authentic chemists, exposing the origins of chemistry, in his book imouth (that is to say dedicated to Imhotep, Egyptian god), a book addressed to his sister Theosebia. This passage is quoted by Georges Le Syncelle, Greek polygrapher of the 8th century. Others tell us that these works of nature, cursed and useless, taught by fallen angels to their wives, were the art of poisons, the secrets of metals and magical incantations (Tertullian). The name of the book shema is found in Egypt in the form shemi, the title of a treatise quoted in a papyrus of the twelfth dynasty and recommended by a scribe to his son. It is probable that the subject was quite different. It was an old title, taken up later to justify it, as often happened in antiquity. Be that as it may, the passage from Zosimus is most characteristic. Without concluding from this, with the adepts of the 17th century, that alchemy was already known before the deluge, it is certain that he takes us back to the imaginations that were current in the East in the first centuries of the Christian era. Isis, in her speech to her son Horus, another alchemical work of the oldest, also tells that the revelation was made to her by Amnael, the first of the angels and the prophets, as a reward for her trade with him. A few strange lines from chapter V of the genesis, probably of Babylonian origin, served as a point of attachment for these imaginations. "The children of God, seeing that the daughters of men were beautiful, chose wives from among them." From there was born a race of giants, whose impiety was the cause of the deluge. Their origin is linked to Enoch. Enoch himself is son of Cain and founder of the city which bears his name, according to one of the genealogies related in the genesis (chapter IV); he descended on the contrary from Seth and he disappeared mysteriously from the world, according to the second genealogy (chapter V) to this equivocal character one attributed an apocryphal work composed a little before the Christian era, the book of Enoch, which plays an important role in the first centuries of Christianity. Georges Le Syncelle has preserved for us considerable fragments of this book, which have since been found in an Ethiopian version. There is a French translation printed in the dictionary of the apocrypha of Migne, Ti, P 395-514. In this book, it is also the sinful angels who reveal the occult arts and sciences to mortals. "They lived with them and they taught them sorcery, enchantments, the properties of roots and trees..., magic signs..., the art of observing the stars... he also taught them, says again the book of Enoch speaking of one of these angels, the use of bracelets and ornaments, the use of paint, the art of painting one's eyebrows, the art of using precious stones and all sorts of dyes, so that the world was corrupted". The authors of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD often return to this legend. Clement of Alexandria quotes it (around 200 of our era) in its stromata, 1 v Tertullian speaks of it at length: “They betrayed the secret of worldly pleasures; they delivered the gold, the silver and their works; they taught the art of dyeing fleeces". Likewise: "They discovered worldly charms, those of gold, of shining stones and of their works". Elsewhere Tertullian says again: "They laid bare the secrets of metals ; they made known the virtue of plants and the power of magic incantations, to their disciples, the Magi, the astrologers and the mathematicians, and he establishes a parallel between the expulsion of these from Rome, and that of the angels from heaven. It seemed to me necessary to develop these quotations, in order to specify the time in which Zosimos wrote: it is the time in which the imaginations relating to the sinful angels and to the revelation of the occult sciences, astrology, magic and alchemy, were current in the world. We see that it is about the third century of our era. The Leide papyri also present the magic recipes associated with the alchemical recipes. The proscription of those who cultivated these sciences is not only a wish of Tertullian, it was effective and this explains to us the care with which they concealed themselves and their works under cover of the most authoritative names. It brings us back to undoubted historical facts and analogies. The condemnation of mathematicians, that is to say astrologers, magicians and other followers of the occult sciences, was common law in Rome. Tacitus informs us that under the reign of Tiberius an edict was issued to drive magicians and mathematicians out of Italy; one of them, Pituanius, was put to death and thrown from the top of a rock. Under Claudius, under Vitellius, new senatus consulta, atrocious and useless, adds Tacitus. Indeed, he says elsewhere, this kind of men who excites deceptive hopes are always proscribed and always sought after. The practice of magic and even the knowledge of this art were deemed criminal and prohibited in Rome, as Paul, a jurisconsult of the time of the Antonines, formally teaches us. Paul lets us know that it was forbidden to possess magic books. When they were discovered, they were publicly burned and the possessor deported; if the latter was of low condition, he was put to death. Such was the constant practice of Roman law. Now the association of magic, astrology and alchemy is evident in the passages of Tertullian quoted above. This association took place particularly in Egypt. The Leide papyri, found in Thebes, complete and clarify these connections between alchemy, astrology and magic; because they show us that the alchemists added to their art, according to the use of primitive peoples, magic formulas suitable for reconciling and even forcing the will of the gods (or demons), superior beings who were supposed to intervene perpetually in the course of things. Natural law acting by itself was too simple and too strong a notion for most men of that time: it had to be supplemented by mysterious recipes. Alchemy, astrology and magic are thus associated and intertwined in the same papyri. We observe the same mixture in certain medieval manuscripts, such as the Greek manuscript 2419 of the national library. However, magic and astrological formulas are no longer generally found in most alchemical treatises proper. It is all the more interesting to point out the traces that still remain there. Such are the mysterious drawing, designated under the name of Chrysopée or art of making gold of Cleopatra, and the magic alphabets of manuscript 2249, analogous to those of a papyrus quoted by Reuvens and of which Mr. Leemans has reproduced the facsimile. The theory of the philosophical egg, the great secret of the work, symbol of the universe and of alchemy, especially gave hold to these imaginations. The bizarre signs of the scorpion and the magical characters transcribed in our manuscripts; the sphere or instrument of Hermes to predict the outcome of illnesses, analogs of which are found both in the 2419 manuscript and in the Leide papyri; the emerald table, quoted throughout the Middle Ages, and the mystical formulas: "Above the celestial things, below the terrestrial things" which are read in the Greek treatises, next to the figures of the apparatus, attest the same association . If it is not more frequent in the works that have come down to us, it is probably because these manuscripts were purified in the Middle Ages by their Christian copyists. This is clearly seen in the Greek manuscript in the library of Saint Mark, the oldest of all, since it seems to date back to the 11th century. We find there not only the Chrysopée of Cleopatra (Fol 188) and the formula of the scorpion (Fol 193), but also the labyrinth of Solomon (Fol 102, V), cabalistic drawing, and, in the form of initial additions (Fol 4), an astrological sphere, the art of interpreting the dreams of Nicephorus, as well as prognoses for the four seasons. The magic alphabets can still be read there; but an attempt has been made to erase them (Fol 193), and most of the words recalling the philosophical egg have been scratched out. It seems to have been done at this time, that is to say from the tenth or eleventh century, a body of works, a sort of purely chemical encyclopedia, carefully separated from magic, astrology and matter. medical. But these various sciences were originally united and cultivated by the same adepts. We therefore understand why Diocletian had the books of alchemy burned in Egypt, as the chroniclers tell us. From the earliest antiquity, moreover, those who deal with the extraction and working of metals have been reputed to be enchanters and magicians. No doubt these transformations of matter, which reach beyond form and make even the specific existence of bodies disappear, seemed to surpass the measure of human power: it was an encroachment on divine power. This is why the invention of the occult sciences and even the invention of all natural science have been attributed by Zosimus and by Tertullian to the accursed angels. This opinion is not surprising in their mouths; it agrees with the old biblical myth of the tree of knowledge, placed in the earthly paradise and whose fruit has destroyed humanity. Indeed, scientific law is fatal and indifferent; the knowledge of nature and the power which results from it can be turned to the evil as to the good: the science of the juices of the plants is as well that of the poisons which kill and the philtres which disturb the spirit, that that of the remedies which cure; the science of metals and their alloys leads to falsifying them, as well as to imitating them and using them for an industrial purpose. Their possession, even legitimate, corrupts man. Also mystical minds have always had a certain tendency to regard science, and especially the science of nature, as sacrilege, because it induces man to compete with the gods. The conception of science destroys, in fact, that of the ancient god, acting on the world by miracle and by personal will: "It is thus that religion, by a just return, is trampled under foot; victory equals us to the gods!" exclaims Lucretius with singular philosophical exaltation. "Do not believe, however, he adds, that I want to initiate you into the principles of impiety and introduce you to the road of crime". As a result of I don't know what secret affinities between deeply troubled epochs, our century has seen the reappearance of the old legend, forgotten for sixteen hundred years. Our poets, A De Vigny, Lamartine, Leconte De Lisle, have taken it up in turn. In eloha, A De Vigny says only one word: the peoples... etc. But Lamartine, in the fall of an angel, grasped the myth more closely.
In the twelfth vision, in the midst of the ministers of their crimes, appear, by an assimilation as a result of I do not know what secret affinities between deeply troubled times, our century has seen the reappearance of the old legend, forgotten for sixteen hundred years. Our poets, A De Vigny, Lamartine, Leconte De Lisle, have taken it up in turn. In eloha, A De Vigny says only one word: the peoples... etc. But Lamartine, in the fall of an angel, grasped the myth more closely. He describes to us the grandiose and cruel civilization of the giant gods, their corruption, their science, their art of metals: from my childhood... etc. In the twelfth vision, in the midst of the ministers of their crimes, appear, by an almost spontaneous assimilation, the agents of the accursed sciences and the "alchemists". Leconte De Lisle took up the myth of the children of Enoch and Cain, from a deeper and more philosophical point of view. After talking about Henokia: the city...etc. The poet opposes, like Lucretius, to the jealous god who predestined man to crime, the revenge of science, superior to divine arbitrariness and the narrow conception of the theological universe: I will collapse...etc. There was already something of this antinomy, in the hatred against science that the book of Enoch and Tertullian let burst out. Science is seen as impious, both in the magic formula that forces the gods to obey man, and in the scientific law that realizes, even in spite of them, the will of man, making vanish even the possibility of their divine power. Now, strange thing, alchemy, from its origins, recognizes and accepts this cursed filiation. It is moreover, even today, classified in the ecclesiastical collection of Migne among the occult sciences, alongside magic and sorcery. The books in which these sciences are dealt with must be burned before the eyes of the bishops, the Theodosian code already said. The authors were similarly burned. Throughout the Middle Ages, accusations of magic and alchemy are associated and directed at the same time against scholars whom their enemies wish to destroy. In the fifteenth century itself, the Archbishop of Prague was prosecuted for necromancy and alchemy, in that Council of Constance which condemned John Huss. Until the sixteenth century these laws remained. Hermolaus Barbarus, patriarch of Aquileia, informs us, in the notes of his commentary on Dioscorides, that in Venice, in 1530, a decree prohibited the art of chemists under capital punishment; in order to avoid any criminal temptation, he adds. Such is, I repeat, the constant translation of the Middle Ages. This is how alchemy appears to us around the third century of our era, itself linking its source to oriental myths, engendered or rather unveiled in the midst of the effervescence caused by the dissolution of the old religions. 4-Gnostic sources. The study of papyri and manuscripts leads to further clarify the time and the point of contact between alchemy and the old beliefs of Egypt and Chaldea. Indeed, this contact coincides with the very contact of these beliefs and those of Christians in the second and third centuries. The first alchemists were Gnostics. According to Reuvens, papyrus N 75 of Leide contains a mixture of magical, alchemical recipes, and Gnostic ideas; the latter borrowed from the doctrines of Marcus. The authors of our treatises, Zosimus, Synesius, Olympiodorus, are also full of Gnostic names and ideas. "Book of Truth of Sophe the Egyptian: Here is the divine work of the lord of the Hebrews and the powers Sabaoth". This title already quoted reappears twice: once alone, another time followed by the words: Mystical Book of Zosimus The Theban". We recognize the analog of the gospel of truth and of the pistis Sophia of Valentine, as kinship of the author with the Jews and with the Gnostics. Indeed the words "lord of the Hebrews and Sabaoth" are characteristic. As for the name of Sophe the Egyptian, it is a form equivalent to that of Souphis, that is to say of Cheops of the Greeks. The book attributed to him here recalls a passage from Africanus, an author of the third century AD, who made an abridgement by the historian Manetho, abridged later compiled by Eusebius. "King Souphis, says Africanus, wrote a sacred book, which I bought in Egypt, as a very precious thing". Apocryphal books were then sold under the name of the old king, the real authors of which were sometimes named after, as in the title of our work Zosimus. The serpent or dragon biting its tail ouroboros is even more significant: it is the symbol of the work, which has neither beginning nor end. In the papyri of Leide, there is talk of a magic ring, on which this snake is traced. It is also figured twice in manuscript 2327, at the head of articles without an author's name, drawn and colored with the greatest care, in two and three concentric circles, of different colors, and associated with the consecrated formulas: "La nature delights in nature, etc.". It is provided with three ears, which represent the three vapours, and four feet, which represent the four fundamental bodies or metals: lead, copper, tin, iron. The last details are singularly reminiscent of the salamander, a mysterious animal that lives in fire, which already appears in Babylon and in Egypt, and whose mysterious properties Aristotle, Pliny, Seneca and the authors of the following century often recall. It is also mentioned in the papyri of Leide and among the Gnostic engraved stones in the collection of the national library: it played a certain role in the magic and medical formulas of that time, following the figure of the serpent, we read in manuscript 2327 an allegorical exposition of the work: "The dragon is the guardian of the temple. Sacrifice it, flay it, separate the flesh from the bones and you will find what you seek". Then come successively the man of bronze, who changes color and transforms into the man of silver; the latter in turn becomes the golden man. Zosimus has reproduced this entire exposition with more development. The same allegories are found elsewhere in an anonymous text, in a form that seems older: the bronze man is immersed in the sacred source, he changes not only color, but body, that is to say of metallic nature, and he becomes the man of asemon, then the golden man . Silver is here replaced by asemon, that is to say by electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, which was one of the old Egyptian metals. Note again these allegories, where the metals are represented as persons, men: this is probably the origin of the homunculus of the Middle Ages; the notion of the creative power of metals and that of life being merged in the same symbol. Another treatise by Zosimus contains an enigmatic figure, formed by three concentric circles, which seem to be the same as those of the serpent, and between which we read these cabalistic words: "One is the whole, through him the whole, and for him the whole, and in him the whole. The serpent is one; he has the two symbols (good and evil) and his poison (or his arrow), etc." A little further on comes the figure of the scorpion and a series of magic and astrological signs. These axioms reappear, but without the figure, written in red ink in folio 88 of No. 2327: probably the figure existed here in the original text; but the copyist will not have reproduced it. In the manuscript of Saint Mark, Fol 188, V, and in the manuscript 2249, Fol 96, under the name of Chrysopée de Cléopâtre, the same design is seen, more complicated and more expressive. Indeed, not only are the three circles drawn, with the same mystical axioms; but the center is filled with the three signs of gold, silver and mercury. On the right side extends a tail-like extension, leading to a series of magic signs, which develop all around. The system of the three circles responds here to the three concentric colors of the serpent mentioned above. Below, we see the very image of the serpent ouroboros, with the central axiom: "one the whole". The serpent, as well as the system of concentric circles, is basically the emblem of the same ideas as the philosophical egg, symbol of the universe and symbol of alchemy. These are Gnostic signs and imaginations, as shown by the magic ring described in the Leide papyrus and as can be seen in the history of the origins of Christianity by M. Renan. The serpent biting its tail continually appears associated with images of the stars and magic formulas on the engraved stones of the Gnostic period. This can be verified in the printed catalog of cameos and engraved stones of the National Library of Paris, by Chabouillet. The numbers 2176, 2177, 2180, 2194, 2196, 2201, 2202, 2203, 2204, 2205, 2206, etc., carry the figure of the ouroboros, with all kinds of cabalistic signs. Likewise the salamander, N 2193. At N 2203 we see Hermes, Serapis, the seven vowels representing the seven planets, all surrounded by the serpent biting its tail. At N 2240, the sign of the planets with that of Mercury, which is the same as today. These were amulets and talismans, which were hung around the neck of the sick, according to Sextus Empiricus, a doctor of the fourth century, and which were used for all sorts of purposes. These symbols are both congeneric and contemporary with those of the alchemists. The serpent biting its tail was worshiped at Hierapolis in Phrygia by the Naassenes, a barely Christian Gnostic sect. The ophites, an important branch of gnosticism, included several sects which met at one point, the adoration of the serpent, considered as the symbol of a superior power; as the sign of wet matter, without which nothing can exist; like the soul of the world that envelops everything and gives birth to all that is, the starry sky that surrounds the stars; the symbol of the beauty and harmony of the universe. The ouroboros serpent therefore symbolized the same things as the philosophical egg of the alchemists. The snake was both good and bad. The latter responds to the Egyptian serpent apophis, symbol of darkness and their struggle against the sun. The ophiouchos, which is both a man and a constellation, plays an essential role in the mythology of the perates, other ophites; he defends man against the evil serpent. We find it again in Olympiodore. Elsewhere we encounter the special language of the Gnostics: "the earth is virgin and bloody, igneous and carnal" the same authors tell us. The Gnostics, as well as the early alchemists and Neoplatonists of Alexandria, combined magic with their religious practices. This explains the presence of the eight-rayed star, the sign of the sun in Assyria, among the symbols which surround Cleopatra's chrysopeae, as well as in the Valentinian writings. It seems to recall the mystical ogdoad of the Gnostics and the eight elementary Egyptian gods, assembled in male and female pairs, of which Seneca speaks. I have shown elsewhere (P 34) that the number four plays a fundamental role in Zosimus, as well as in the Egyptians and in the Gnostic Marcus. The role of the male element, assimilated to the east, and of the female element, compared to the west; the work accomplished by their union; the importance of the hermaphrodite element (the Egyptian goddess Neith) cited by Zosimus, and which reappears even in the writings of the Middle Ages; the intervention of alchemist women, Theosebia, Mary the Jewess, Cleopatra the scholar, who recall the Gnostic prophetesses, are also features common to the Gnostics and the alchemists. Jewish traditions played an important role among the Marcosian Gnostics. This is again consistent with the intervention of the Jews in the alchemical writings and in the papyri of Leide. Zosimus and Olympiodorus reproduce the speculations of the Gnostics on Adam, the universal man identified with the Egyptian Toth: the four letters of his name represent the four elements. Eve finds herself likened to Pandora. Prometheus and Epimetheus are quoted and regarded as expressing in allegorical language the soul and the body. We also find in the geoponica a recipe attributed to Democritus and in which appears the name of Adam, intended to ward off snakes from a dovecote. In a grosser form, it is always the same order of superstitions. Such a mixture of Greek, Jewish and Christian myths is characteristic. The Sethians, a Gnostic sect, similarly associated the Orphic mysteries with biblical notions. Our alchemical authors do not fail either to rely on the authority of the Hebrew books; and that in the manner of the first Christian apologists, that is to say, by joining them to Hermes, to Orpheus, to Hesiod, to Aratus, to the philosophers, to the masters of ancient wisdom. This language, these signs, these symbols put us back in the middle of the comprehensive syncretism, well known in history, where the beliefs and cosmogonies of the East were confused both with each other and with Hellenism and Christianity. The Gnostic hymns of Synesius, who is at the same time a philosopher and a bishop, a scientist and an alchemist, show the same assemblage. Now, Gnosticism played a great role throughout the East and especially in Alexandria, in the second century of our era; but its general influence hardly lasted beyond the fourth century. It is therefore towards this interval of time that we are brought back more and more urgently by the alchemical texts. These show that there existed from the beginning a secret affinity between gnosis, which teaches the true meaning of philosophical and religious theories, hidden under the veil of symbols and allegories, and chemistry, which pursues the knowledge of the hidden properties of nature, and which represents them, even today, by signs with double and triple meaning. Historical evidence. So far we have exposed the history of the origins of alchemy, as it results from the study of the oldest monuments of this science, papyri and manuscripts in libraries. We have shown the agreement of the information drawn from these two sources, with each other and with the doctrines and prejudices of the first centuries of the Christian era. This concordance attests that the manuscript treatises were composed at the same time as the papyri found in the tombs of Thebes: verification all the more useful since the oldest copies that we possess of these manuscript treatises do not go back beyond the XI century. Not only do the papyri and the manuscripts in the libraries agree; but the names of the gods of men, of the months, of the places, the allusions of all kinds, the ideas and the theories expounded in the manuscripts and in the papyri correspond, with a singular precision in the details, to what we know of the Grecized Egypt of the first centuries of the Christian era and the strange mixture of philosophical, religious, mystical and magical doctrines, which characterizes the Neoplatonists and the Gnostics. We will establish in another part of this work a similar comparison between the practical notions, recorded in the papyri and the manuscripts, and the facts known today on the Egyptian industries relating to metallurgy, the manufacture of glasses and the dyeing. fabrics. Our museums provide the most diverse and authentic evidence in these respects. Such are the results obtained by the intrinsic study of ancient texts and monuments. It is appropriate to check the results of this study, bringing them closer to the facts and to the positive indications found in ordinary authors and historians. None of these spoke of alchemy before the Christian era. The oldest allusion that can be reported in this respect would be a singular sentence of Dioscorides, a Greek physician and botanist: "some report that mercury is a constituent part of metals". Dioscorides appears contemporary with the Christian era; the manuscripts of this author that we have are very beautiful, and dated in a precise way: the two main ones were transcribed in the middle of the 5th century. We also quote a passage from Pliny the Elder, according to which there is a process for making gold by means of orpiment: Caligula, he says, calcined a considerable quantity of orpiment to extract but he succeeds; but the yield was so minimal that the quantity of gold obtained did not pay the cost of the operation. "invitaverat spes...". It is obviously the first attempt at transmutation, or rather at the artificial preparation of gold, that history has handed down to us. The fact in itself, as Pliny reports it, is moreover only plausible: for it seems that what was involved here was an operation analogous to cupellation, having the purpose and result of extracting the gold contained in certain metallic sulphides, indicated by their color as being able to contain it. Extraction of pre-existing gold, or manufacture of this metal from scratch, these are two quite distinct ideas for us; but they were confused in the minds of the old operators. We find, around the same period, a clearer statement in Manilius, author of an astrological poem in excellent language, and whom the critics agree to regard as a contemporary of Tiberius. In Book IV, he develops in beautiful verses the effects of fire: "the search for hidden metals and buried riches, the calcination of ore veins, the art of doubling matter by a certain process, as well as objects of gold and silver...". Scaliger believed this interpolated passage, but mostly because of its meaning: which is a vicious circle. It is consistent with historical analogies that an astrologer, such as Manilius, had a more particular knowledge of alchemy. Moreover, the idea of doubling gold and silver diplosis was common as early as the 2nd and 3rd centuries of our era, as the papyri of Leide show, in agreement with the manuscripts of the libraries. Let's come to people and chemical industries. The oldest authors cited by the alchemical manuscripts, Democritus, Ostanes, also appear as magicians and astrologers in columella, in Pliny and in the writers of antiquity. The name of the alchemist Pammenes is found in Tacitus, like that of a magician. The Egyptian astrologer Petosiris, whose treatises are associated with alchemical works in manuscript 2419 of the national library, is cited by Pliny, by Juvenal and already by Aristophanes. Seneca also recalls Democritus' practical knowledge of the art of coloring glass, an art similar to the art of coloring metals: "he had found a way to soften ivory, to change sand into emerald by cooking and his process is still followed today. "excidit porro vobis (...). Are these authentic inventions of the old philosopher? Or are we not dealing with Egyptian pseudonyms, perhaps even with those whose treatises we have? I will come back to this problem. Pline speaks similarly of works where the art of dyeing artificial emeralds and other brilliant stones was taught. These were Egyptian arts par excellence and the recipes of our manuscripts agree with this indication; assuming, I repeat, that they do not exactly reproduce the processes to which Pliny alluded. We have given above the passages where Tertullian speaks, in the third century, of the mysteries of metals and precious stones, revealed by the rebel angels, of the secrets of gold and silver, compared to those of magic and astrology: it is obviously here about alchemy. We also find in the Neoplatonic Iamblichus, a passage where magic seems associated with the art of composing precious stones, and mixing plant products. The alchemical manuscripts even attribute to Iamblichus two processes of transmutation. A more explicit text is that of the Byzantine chroniclers, according to which Diocletian destroyed the books of alchemy in Egypt. The fact is entirely in conformity with the practice of Roman law; it is attested by Jean D' Antioche, author who wrote at the time of Héraclius (VIIe century) and who seems to have copied on this point the Egyptian chronograph Panodorus, contemporary of Arcadius. This text was subsequently reproduced by Suidas and several other authors. These authors expressly say that "Diocletian burned around the year 290, the ancient books of chemistry of the Egyptians relating to gold and silver, These texts are completely in conformity with the passage of Zosimus already quoted, according to which the kingdom of Egypt was enriched by alchemy. It seems to respond to the destruction of certain treatises, where positive metallurgy, highly cultivated in ancient Egypt, was associated with chimerical recipes for transmutation: treatises similar to those which appear in the papyri of Leide and in our manuscripts. The concordance of all these facts, drawn from various sources, is striking. Alchemy was originally referred to as sacred science, divine and sacred art, designations which it shared with magic. The very name of alchemy first appears in an astrological treatise by Julius Firmicus, a writer of the fourth century CE, whose general conformity with Manilius is well known: "If it is the house of Mercury, it gives astronomy; that of Venus announces songs and joy; that of Mars, arms... that of Jupiter, divine worship and the science of laws; that of Saturn, the science of alchemy". The addition of the prefix Al is suspicious and probably due to a copyist; but the existence of the very name of chemistry in Firmicus has not been called into doubt. The patronage of Saturn recalls both lead, which is dedicated to him, and Osiris, synonymous with lead, and whose tomb was the emblem of chemistry, according to Olympiodorus. Julius Firmicus reproduces elsewhere one of the favorite axioms of pseudo-Democritus and his commentators: "Nature is conquered by nature". Julius Firmicus brings us back to the time of Zosimus, or rather of his first successors. A very explicit text can be read in the theophrastus of Aeneas Of Gaza, a dialogue relating to the resurrection of the dead, and which constitutes with Pliny and Manilius, apart from the papyri and alchemical manuscripts of course, the oldest precise document, of date certain, where it is a question of the transmutation of metals. Aeneas De Gaza was a 5th-century Neoplatonic philosopher, a pupil of Hierocles, who later converted to Christianity. After having explained that the human body, formed by the assembly of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire), reproduces them by its decomposition, he resumes the Platonic thesis of ideas, according to which: "The form remains, while matter experiences changes, because matter is made to take on all qualities. Consider a bronze statue of Achilles; suppose it destroyed, and its remains reduced to small pieces; if now an artisan collects this bronze, purifies it, and, by a singular science, changes it into gold and gives it the figure of Achilles, this one will be in gold instead of being in bronze; but it will nevertheless be Achilles. Thus behaves the matter of the perishable and corruptible body, which by the art of the creator becomes pure and immortal". This passage could be interpreted as a simple philosophical hypothesis; but Aeneas De Gaza clarifies it, saying a little further: " The change in matter for the better is nothing incredible; it is thus that scholars in the art of matter take silver and pewter, make their appearance disappear, color and change matter into excellent gold. With the divided sand and the dissoluble natron, glass is made, that is to say, a new and shiny thing". It is always the same association between the various practices of the chemistry of fire, relating to glasses and metals. The mystical mixture of the ideas of transmutation and resurrection is found in the treatises of the Greek alchemists, as well as in Aeneas Of Gaza. "One must strip matter of its qualities in order to arrive at perfection, says Stephanus; for the goal of philosophy is the dissolution of (material) bodies and the separation of the soul from the body". called by this name is a charlatan, Johannes Isthmeos, who defrauded goldsmiths in the time of the Emperor Anastasius and who presented this emperor with a solid gold horse bit: "You will not deceive me like the others," retorted Anastasius, and he relegated him, year 504, in the fortress of Petra, where he died. All the Byzantine chroniclers, Cedrenus, John Malala, tenth-century authors, Theophanes, and others, who have told the story of that time, speak of the personage in much the same terms; probably by reproducing the same original text. This account recalls the proscriptions of the Chaldeans under the first emperors. Johannes Isthmeos was the ancestor of the alchemists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who made so many dupes by operating in front of the credulous the transmutation of metals: between the followers of the occult sciences, the charlatans and the swindlers, there has always existed a close relationship. Alchemy, considered as forming a body of scientific doctrines, is not mentioned in ancient historians who have come down to us, at least before Jean D'Antioche, who seems to have lived in the 7th century. We have reproduced his passage relating to the destruction of chemical works in Egypt by Diocletian. But this passage is certainly drawn from older chroniclers, probably from Panodorus. One could also recall Ostanes and Democritus, named in Pliny and in Columella, in truth as magicians, rather than as alchemists explicitly designated: the treatises of the latter relating to the coloring of glass do indeed belong to our science. In the eighth century, the polygraph Georges Le Syncelle knows our main authors and he recounts the alleged initiation of Democritus by Ostanes, Mary the Jewess and Pammenes; he quotes his four books on gold, silver, stones and purple, in much the same terms as Synesius. This text is also taken from previous chroniclers. According to Scaliger, it was written by the Egyptian chronograph Panodorus, a contemporary monk of Arcadius and whom Le Syncelle cites with the greatest praise; this brings us back again to the time of Synesius. Georges Le Syncelle also reproduces extensive extracts from Zosimus and Synesius: some of these same extracts can be read verbatim in the manuscripts of our libraries. Le Syncelle and the authors he copied therefore had in their hands the very works that have come down to us. Photius, a ninth-century compiler, also quotes Zosimus, as well as Olympiodorus, whose biography he tells us. Suidas, in the tenth century, uses the same language. At the same time we can invoke an authority of a completely different order, that of the Arabs. In the Khitab-Al-Fihrist, an encyclopedia written around the year 235 of the Hegira, that is to say around the year 850 of our era, there are several pages devoted to the list of alchemical authors (P 253 of the 1871 edition). Mr. Leclerc quoted this text and Mr. Derenbourg had the kindness to translate it to me verbally. We read the names of a large number of authors: some lost, the others inscribed in the Greek manuscripts that we possess, such as Hermes, Agothodemon, Ostanes, Chymès, Cleopatra, Mary, Stephanus, Sergius, Dioscorus, etc. from this time, we find among the Byzantines, then among the Arabs and among the Westerners, an uninterrupted chain of historical testimonies, relating to alchemy and to the people who cultivated it. We are, moreover, approaching the date when the copies of the manuscripts in our possession were made, the oldest of which, that of Saint Mark in Venice, for example, date back to the eleventh century; that is, they are almost contemporaneous with Suidas. It results from this set of facts and documents an uninterrupted filiation of testimonies relating to alchemy and writers; alchemicals, at least since the 3rd century CE; filiation which yields it in value and in certainty to none of those on which rests the authority of the most authentic works of antiquity. 3-Democritus. Democritus and the traditions associated with it play a central role in the history of the origins of alchemy. Indeed, by the books that have come down to us and which contain recipes and practical formulas, the oldest work of all, the one that authors having some historical authority cite, and which cites none, it is that of Democritus, entitled Physica and Mystica. This work is pseudonymous, I need not repeat it; but it is connected with the authentic work of Democritus by links easy to glimpse. Certainly, the historians of ancient philosophy have the right and the duty to admit only indisputable books, when it is a question of establishing what Democritus really wrote. But this is not a sufficient reason to set aside the rest of the domain of history and to refuse to establish its time and filiation. Indeed the works of the imitators, even pseudonyms, of Democritus have their own date and character. These works are old, too, and they respond to a certain degree to the incessant evolution of human beliefs, philosophical doctrines and positive knowledge. The magic and naturalistic books which were attributed to Democritus, in the time of Pliny and Columella, would stain the life of the great rationalist philosopher; but they nevertheless claimed to be inspired by him. They contributed to the mystical and practical education of several generations of men; they are also most directly related to the history of the origins of one of the fundamental sciences of our time, chemistry. Before talking about this order of works and trying to find the real names of some of the authors of these pseudo-democratic treatises, let us first find out what link they can offer with the real events of the life of the philosopher and the works that he actually composed. Democritus, of Abdera, died around the year 357 before the Christian era, is one of the most famous and least known Greek philosophers. at least by his authentic works. He was a rationalist and a powerful mind. He had written before Aristotle, who quotes him frequently, on all branches of human knowledge and he had composed various works relating to the natural sciences, as Diogenes Laerce, his biographer, teaches us. He is the founder of the atomistic school, later taken up by Epicurus, a school which had so many followers in antiquity and which has again made a fortune among modern chemists. Democritus had traveled in Egypt, in Chaldea and in various parts of the East and he had been initiated into the theoretical knowledge and perhaps also into the practical arts of these countries. These journeys were a tradition among the early Greek philosophers, who used to complete their education in this way. The travels of Herodotus are certain and told by himself. Tradition has transmitted to us the memory of those of Plato, Pythagoras and Democritus. The latter in particular are attested by all antiquity. Diogenes Laertius points them out, and this, it seems, according to Antisthenes, an author almost contemporary with Democritus; which reported that Democritus learned geometry from the priests and visited Egypt, Persia and the Red Sea. Cicero and Strabo speak of these journeys. According to Diodorus, Democritus stayed five years in Egypt. Clement of Alexandria, in a passage part of which, according to Mullach, was taken from Democritus himself, also says that he went to Babylon, Persia, Egypt and studied under the Magi and priests. . Also certain works on the sacred writings of the Chaldeans and on those of Meroe were attributed to him. If I insist on the travels and on the education of Democritus, it is because these accounts, which seem authentic, change their appearance in Pliny the Elder. Pliny is the first author who transformed the character of the rationalist philosopher, and who attributed to him this quality of magician, which remained from then on attached to his name throughout the Middle Ages. Thus Pliny makes Democritus, the father of magic, and it preludes the stories of Synésius and Georges Le Syncelle, according to which Democritus would have been initiated into alchemy by the Egyptian priests and by Ostanes the magus. One encounters the same mixture of traditions, some authentic, others apocryphal, in the study of the works of Democritus. The works of Democritus and his school formed in antiquity a sort of philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, analogous to the collection of treatises which bear the name of Aristotle. It was collected and classified into tetralogies by the grammarian Thrasyllus, in the time of Tiberius. Unfortunately these books are now lost, with the exception of various fragments collected here and there and brought together first by M Franck, in 1836, then by Mullach. Mullach, with a severe criticism, made the share of the authentic works in his collection, and he carefully discarded all that seemed to him pseudonymous or apocryphal. However, an absolute separation between the two orders of writings put under the name of Democritus is perhaps impossible, because of successive imitations and interpolations; especially with regard to the works of natural history and agriculture, so often quoted by Pliny and his contemporaries, and of which the geoponica have preserved very extensive remains for us. Diogenes Laerce attributes to Democritus treatises on the juice of plants (also cited by Petronius), on stones, minerals, colors, metals, the tinting of glass, etc. Seneca also says that Democritus had discovered the processes followed in his time for softening ivory, preparing artificial emerald, coloring vitrified materials: ... etc. This recalls the four books on the dyeing of gold, silver, stones and purple, later assigned by Synesius and by Georges Le Syncelle to Democritus. Olympiodorus, author alchemist of the fourth century, speaks again of the four books of Democritus on the elements: fire and what comes from it; the air, the animals and what comes from it; water, fish and what comes from it; earth, salts, metals, plants and what comes from them, etc. All this seems to relate to ancient treatises. The rigorous departure between the authentic works and the works of the disciples and imitators of Democritus, who followed one another for five or six centuries, is today, I repeat, difficult; especially in the absence of complete and absolutely certain works. However, these works, even pseudonyms, sometimes seem to contain fragments of older books. The whole of them is interesting, as if bearing the stamp of the time when they were written, from the double point of view of mystical or philosophical doctrines and positive knowledge. I recently found in the alchemical manuscripts and published a fragment on the dyeing in purple by vegetable way, fragment which seems to have belonged to the collection of the works of Démocrite; I mean the works quoted by Diogenes Laerce, Petronius and Seneca. The subjects they dealt with, in particular the study of the tinting of glass and enamels, explain to us how the first alchemists, eager to hide under the aegis of an authorized precursor, gave the name of Democritus to their treatise. fundamental, physica and mystica. This one is an incoherent assembly of several pieces of different origin. It begins, without preamble, by a technical process for dyeing purple; it is the one that I translated: this fragment, whose character is purely technical, has no connection with the rest. The manuscripts contain an evocation of the underworld of the master of Democritus (Ostanes), then alchemical recipes. Let us give some details on these various parts. The second magical evocation fragment reports that the master having died, without having had time to initiate Democritus into the mysteries of science, the latter evoked him from the bosom of hell: "So this is the reward for what I have done for you", exclaims the apparition. To Democritus' questions, she answers: "The books are in the temple". However, we couldn't find them. Some time later, during a feast, one of the columns of the temple was seen half opening; there were seen the books of the master, which contained only the three mystical axioms: "Nature delights in nature; nature triumphs over nature; nature dominates nature"; axioms which then reappear like a refrain, at the end of each of the paragraphs of the alchemical opuscule proper. This fantastic tale was reproduced more than once in the Middle Ages, under different names, and attributed to various famous masters. The evocation itself contrasts by its character with the first and the last parts, where nothing analogous is found. However, it recalls the title of a work on the underworld, attributed to Democritus and whose true character is uncertain. Perhaps also it is necessary to look there for some recollection of the ideas of the true Democritus on phantoms and on dreams, to which he supposed a real existence. We find similar ideas in Epicurus and in Lucretius, who attributed to images issuing from bodies a certain substantial reality, analogous to that of the moulting of serpents. It is conceivable that such theories easily led to imaginations similar to those of spiritualists today. Be that as it may, the story of the evocation that I have just recalled brings us back to the apocryphal magical works, which were already attributed to Democritus in the time of Pliny; I wouldn't be surprised if she even got away with it. We would then have here three orders of pieces of different date: the alchemical, apocryphal and most recent part, but earlier than the 4th century CE; the magical part, also apocryphal, but preceding Pliny; and the technical part, perhaps the oldest, relating alone to Democritus, or rather to his school. This association, by copyists, of fragments from different periods is not uncommon in manuscripts. In any case, it takes place in four manuscripts of the national library, which seem to come from a common source. It also exists in the manuscript of Saint Mark, which dates back to the 11th century. Certainly, it is strange to see a man like Democritus, endowed with an inflexible incredulity vis-à-vis miracles, according to Lucian, a naturalist philosopher and free thinker par excellence, metamorphosed into a magician and an alchemist! Pliny says, in fact, that Democritus was instructed in magic by Ostanes; he returns several times to his relations with the Magi. Solin speaks on the contrary of his discussions against them. According to Pliny, Democritus violated the tomb of Dardanus, to remove the magical books which were buried there, and he himself composed magical works. However Pliny adds that many hold these to be apocryphal. The practice of enclosing manuscripts in the tombs recalls the papyri which we find today with the mummies and which have preserved for us so much precious information about antiquity. Analogous accounts of tombs violated have often been told in order to draw from them the books of the masters, in the legends of the Middle Ages, and already in those of old Egypt. They were not without some foundation. It is precisely a tomb in Thebes, no doubt that of a magician, which has returned the papyri from the Anastasi collection to us, today in Leide. Now these last papyri show that the transformation of Democritus into a magician is not attested only by Pliny and by the alchemical manuscripts of our libraries. The name of Democritus is found twice in the magic ritual of the Leide papyri, papyri which contain both magic recipes and alchemical recipes. We also find in these papyri, under the title of sphere of Democritus, a table in numbers intended to predict the life or death of a patient; table quite similar to the tables of Hermes and Petosiris which exist in the manuscripts of the libraries. All this, I repeat, shows that the traditions attached to the name of Democritus in Egypt, at the time of the first centuries of the Christian era, had the same character as in our manuscripts. Let us add, as a last common trait, that in papyrus N 66 of Leide, the processes of dyeing purple, the metallurgical recipes, the transmutation recipes and the magic recipes are similarly associated. Now these various orders of procedures are read together in the pamphlet of the pseudo Democritus, a pamphlet translated or rather paraphrased into Latin, according to a manuscript similar to ours, and published in Padua, by Pizzimenti, in 1573, under the title Democriti Abderitae De Arte Magnâ, with commentaries by Synésius, Pelagius and Stephanus D'Alexandrie. I analyzed it above. Mullach wrongly regards this pamphlet as distinct from Physica and Mystica; I made sure that there is no other difference between them than the absence of the two pieces relating to the purple dye and the magical evocation. These seem to have been added at the head by some copyist, on the sole analogy of the name of the author, real or pretended, and perhaps also on the analogy of the subjects tincture in purple and tincture of metals . The manuscript of Saint Mark (Fol 2) distinguishes, in fact, the two subjects, in a table of contents older than this manuscript. There is another treatise by pseudo-Democritus, a treatise dedicated to Leucippus, a philosopher who was indeed the master and friend of Democritus. "I will use riddles, but they will not stop you, you doctor who knows everything". It is the style of the apocrypha. Democritus' letter to Philaret, another work by the same writer, begins with a list of bodies. "Here is the catalog of species: mercury taken from the egg, magnesia, antimony, Chalcedony and Italian litharge, lead, tin, iron, copper, gold solder, etc." then comes the mysterious art of metallic dyes. The above account agrees with other authors. Indeed, according to Synésius, reproduced by George Le Syncelle, Democritus had written four books of tinctures on gold, silver, stones and purple: which recalls both the preceding letter and the passage from Seneca . Synesius also says that Democritus had drawn up a catalog of white and yellow. "He first recorded the solids, then the liquids. He called the catalog of gold, that is to say yellow: Chrysopée, or the art of making gold; and the catalog of money, that is to say that of white: Argyropée, or the art of making money". All these comments show what interest was attached to the recipes of pseudo-Democritus and allow us to date them back before the end of the fourth century AD, perhaps even much earlier Let us first focus on the authority of Synesius: he addresses his commentary on Democritus to Dioscorus, priest of Serapis in Alexandria ; dedication in accordance with the opinion which identifies the alchemist and the bishop of Ptolemais, who lived at the end of the fourth century. His work must have been written before the year 389, the date of the destruction of the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. he cites Zosimus the Panopolitan as a very ancient author; which would bring it back at least to the time of Constantine or Diocletian; maybe even further. The Gnostic language of Zosimus is indeed that of the authors of the end of the second century and the beginning of the third. However, the pseudo Democritus is already an authority for Zosimus. Let's try to go further. The ancient authors point out certain writings or memoirs on nature, made by an Egyptian, Bolus De Mendes, and wrongly attributed to Democritus. These memoirs were called Chirocmeta, that is to say, manipulations, a name which was also given to the writings of Zosimus Pliny, who believes the memoirs of Democritus to be authentic, declares that they are filled with the narration of marvelous things. Perhaps Democritus had really composed treatises of this kind, to which were then added those of his imitators. Another work on "the sympathies and the antipathies" is assigned sometimes to Démocrite by Columelle, sometimes to Bolus by Suidas. This book was published by Fabricius in his Greek library: it is a heap of tales and childishness; but Pliny is full of analogous recipes and stories. Aulu-Gelle formally says that uneducated authors put their works under the name of Democritus, in order to authorize themselves from his illustration. However, it is not proven that Bolus knowingly committed this fraud. It seems rather to have declared itself from the school of Democritus, following a widespread usage in the past. Perhaps he took the name of Democritus in the secret ceremonies of the initiates. Stephanus of Byzantium, under Apsinthios, indeed speaks of Bolus the Democritan; likewise the Scholia Nicandri Ad Theriaca. In Suidas and in the Violarium of the Empress Eudocia, another Byzantine collection, there is question of Bolus the Pythagorean, who had written on marvels, on natural powers, on sympathies and antipathies, on stones, etc. Bolus is at least contemporary with the Christian era, if not older. It is to some work of the order of his that the agricultural, veterinary and other recipes attributed to Democritus the naturalist in the Geoponica, a Byzantine collection of recipes and facts relative to agriculture, should be related. Some of these statements even feel Jewish or Gnostic influences; for example this one: "according to Democritus, partly chimerical, occult sciences and industrial practices of old Egypt and Babylon have been preserved. On these equivocal roots of astrology and alchemy later arose the positive sciences of which we are so proud: the knowledge of their real origins only offers more interest for the history of the development of human spirit. In fact, I repeat, it is to this tradition that the alchemists belong, as well as the papyri of Leide. It is possible that the magical works of which Pliny speaks already contain alchemical accounts and recipes, similar to those of Physica and Mystica: assuming that this last work does not come directly from them. The very language lent to Democritus the alchemist is sometimes that of a charlatan, sometimes that of a philosopher: perhaps because of the mixture of authentic and apocryphal works. Sometimes, in fact, he declares: "It must not be believed that it is by some natural sympathy that the magnet attracts iron... but that results from the physical properties of bodies". Sometimes, on the contrary, Democritus, addressing the king, says: "It is necessary, O king, to know this: we are the rulers, the priests and the prophets; the one who did not know the substances and did not combine them and has not understood the species and joined the genera to the genera, will work in vain and his pains will be useless; because the natures please each other, rejoice with each other, corrupt each other, transform with each other and regenerate with each other. they" . There exists in the manuscripts a famous page which exposes the virtues of the philosopher, ie of the initiate. Now, this prescription is attributed by Cedrenus to Democritus, and he adds that whoever possesses these virtues will understand the enigma of the Sibyl, a direct allusion to one of the alchemical treatises. Elsewhere, Democritus the alchemist appeals, not in some naivete, to his old fellow workers against the skepticism of youth. "You therefore, O my co-prophets, you trust and you know the power of matter; while the young people do not trust what is written: they believe that our language is fabulous and not symbolic". He then speaks of the superficial tinting of metals and their deep tinting, of that which the fire dissipates and of that which resists it, etc.: which indeed responds to real and scientific notions. As for the alchemical recipes themselves of the pseudo Democritus, we glimpse various real experiences, associated with chimerical results. Such is the following text: "Take mercury, fix it with the body of magnesia, or with the body of the stibium of Italy, or with the sulfur which has not passed through the fire, or with the aphroselinum , or quicklime, or the alum of Melos, or thearsenic , or as you please, and throw the white powder on the copper; then you will have copper that will have lost its dark color. Pour the red powder on the silver, you will have gold; if it is on the gold that you throw it, you will have the corporified gold coral. The sandarac produces this yellow powder, as well as arsenic well prepared, as well as cinnabar, after it has been completely changed. Mercury alone can strip copper of its dark color. Nature triumphs over nature". It is hardly possible today to interpret this text with precision: firstly because the words mercury, arsenic, sulphur, magnesia, presented for the alchemists neither the positive meaning nor the precise meaning that they have for us; each of them actually designated various matters, having in the opinion of the authors of the time a common essence. This notion is analogous to the ideas of the Egyptians on the nature of metals. Moreover, the interest of such a study is limited. Indeed, the operations carried out by the alchemists are known by their descriptions; these operations do not differ from ours and relate to the same substances. Now, all the positive results of the dissolutions, distillations, calcinations, cupellations, etc., in which they indulged are now perfectly clarified: we know that the transmutation so much dreamed of never takes place there. It is therefore useless to look for the exact formula in the recipes of pseudo Democritus, Sosimus or their successors. It seems, moreover, that these authors always left some obscure portion, intended to be communicated only by word of mouth. This is indicated by the end of pseudo-Democritus. "Here is all that is needed for gold and silver; nothing is forgotten, nothing is missing, except the vapor and the evaporation of water: I have omitted them on purpose, having fully exposed in my other writings". I would say, however, that in the descriptions of the treatise Physica and Mystica, we glimpse two powders of projection, suitable for manufacturing gold and silver. There is also mention of gold coral, in other words gold tincture,
Metals among the Egyptians. the introduction. Alchemy was based on a certain set of practical facts known in antiquity, and which concerned the preparation of metals, their alloys and that of artificial precious stones: there was an experimental side to this which has never ceased to to progress throughout the Middle Ages, until modern and positive chemistry emerged from it. This story is none other than that of the metallurgical industry. Certainly I cannot claim to embrace it entirely within the restricted framework of the present study; but it is necessary to expose it in part, to show the positive origin of the ideas and illusions of the alchemists. This origin must be sought in Egypt, where alchemy first had its masters, its laboratories and its traditions. This is why, after having established in the preceding books the historical character of traditions, I am now going to summarize the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians on metals and on related substances. I will do this mainly from the capital memoir of M. Lepsius on this question, and I will show by what series of reasonings and analogies they were led to attempt transmutation and to pursue the experiments whose execution we have observed at Memphis and Alexandria. On the monuments of ancient Egypt we see metals figure, either as spoils of war, or as tribute from conquered peoples; we recognize its image in the tombs, in the treasure chambers of the temples, in the offerings made to the gods. According to Lepsius, the Egyptians distinguish in their inscriptions eight particularly precious mineral products, which they arrange in the following order: gold, or Nub; asem, or electrum, an alloy of gold and silver; money, or hat; the chesteb, or blue mineral, such as lapis lazuli; mafek, or green mineral, such as emerald; chomt, brass, bronze, or copper; the men, or iron (after Lepsius); finally the taht, in other words lead. This order is constant; we find it on the monuments of the Theban dynasties, and up to the time of the Ptolemies and the Romans. In the annals of the companions of Thutmose III, at Carnak, one often finds, among the tributes, lists and figured tables of these precious substances, arranged according to their weight and number. The various materials which I have just enumerated include both real metals and precious stones, natural or artificial. Let us review them: we will recognize in their properties the starting point of certain theoretical ideas of the alchemists on metals. It is indeed necessary to place oneself in the midst of the facts and notions known to the ancients, to understand their conceptions.
Gold, reputed to be the most precious of metals, is represented in heaps, in purses containing gold powder and natural nuggets, in worked objects, such as plates, bars, bricks, rings. We first distinguish good gold, then rock gold, that is to say raw, unrefined, and finally certain alloys, electros or electrum in particular.
Silver is featured on Egyptian monuments in the same forms as gold, but with a different color. Its name even precedes that of gold in some inscriptions, for example on the stelae of Barkal at Boulaq: as if the ratio between the two metals had been inverted at certain times, as a result of the abundance of gold. We know that their relative value, without changing to such a degree, has nevertheless been very different among certain peoples; among the Japanese of our time, for example, it has deviated a great deal from the relationships accepted in Europe. Silver was prepared with very unequal degrees of purity. It was alloyed not only with gold, in electrum, but with lead, in the product of the processing of certain silver-bearing ores. These unequal degrees of purity had been noticed early, and they had given rise among the ancients to the distinction between silver without mark, without title, asemon, and pure, monetary silver, the title of which was guaranteed by the mark. or effigy printed on its surface. The Greek word asemon has also been confused with asem, the Egyptian name for electrum, asem also being a variety of impure silver. In extracting silver from its ores, it was first untitled silver that was obtained. Its impurity favored the opinion that one could succeed in doubling the weight of silver, by suitable mixtures and knacks. It was indeed the untitled silver that the alchemists claimed to manufacture by their processes, except to purify it afterwards. In the papyri of Leide, and in our Greek manuscripts, the words: "making the asemon", are synonymous with transmutation; it was operated from lead, copper and especially tin. It was also by coloring asemon that gold was thought to be obtained: which brings us back to the variety of raw silver which contained gold, i.e. electrum.
The electros, or electrum, in Egyptian asem, an alloy of gold and silver, is seen alongside gold on monuments; it has been mistakenly confused by some with what we call vermeil, that is to say gilded silver, which is only dyed on the surface. Sometimes the name of the electrum appears alone on the monuments, in place of the silver. In the same way among the alchemists, the mystical name of men of silver is replaced in certain places by that of men of electrum. Harder and lighter than pure gold, this alloy was better suited to the manufacture of worked objects. It was formerly regarded as a metal of the same order as gold and silver. The planet Jupiter was originally consecrated to him, an attribution which is still attested to by authors of the fifth century of our era. Later, electrum having disappeared from the list of metals, this planet was assigned to tin. The alloy of gold and silver is easily produced in the treatment of ores which contain the two simple metals. It was therefore the original substance, that from which the two others were drawn by suitable operations, and it is not surprising that the ancients made a particular metal of it; especially in the most remote times, when the processes of separation were hardly sketched out. Nero seems to be the first sovereign who demanded fine gold. "all gold", says Pliny, "contains silver in various proportions; when silver enters for a fifth, the metal takes the name of electrum. Electrum is also made by adding silver to gold". The proportions pointed out by Pliny had nothing constant about them. Electrum, having a composition less well defined than the pure metals, appeared to form the passage between the two. We knew, in fact, how to extract them both; gold was, I repeat, the principal product and silver represented its dross, as Pliny says. Hence the identification of the Egyptian name of electrum, asem, with that of impure silver, asemon, and the idea that gold and silver, congeneric bodies, could be manufactured by the same method of transmutation. . With the progress of the purification of metals, the electrum fell into disuse. However, his name is still inscribed in the list of alchemical signs, among the metallic substances. The word electrum had a double meaning among the Greeks and Romans: that of metal and that of yellow amber. Its brilliance has been compared to that of gushing water by Callimachus, and later by Virgil; comparison which brings us back to the identification made by Plato's Timaeus between chemical waters and metals. It is therefore easy to see how, in Aristophanes' Scholiaste, electrum is assimilated to glass. Suidas in turn defines it: a form of gold mixed with glass and precious stones. Later the meaning of the word changed and was applied, perhaps because of the analogy of color, to various bright yellow alloys, such as certain bronzes (similor) and brass itself. According to Du Cange, the authors of the Middle Ages designate under the name of electrum a mixture of copper and tin. In a passage from this latter period, Indeed the assimilation of electrum to gold and silver explains how these latter bodies could be considered as alloys, capable of being reproduced by associations of materials and by tricks of the trade; how above all, starting from real gold, one could hope to increase its diplosis weight by certain mixtures, and by certain additions of ingredients, which left its fundamental nature to subsist. The chesbet and the mafek will reveal to us more extensive assimilations. one could hope to increase its diplosis weight by certain mixtures, and by certain additions of ingredients, which left its fundamental nature to subsist. The chesbet and the mafek will reveal to us more extensive assimilations. one could hope to increase its diplosis weight by certain mixtures, and by certain additions of ingredients, which left its fundamental nature to subsist. The chesbet and the mafek will reveal to us more extensive assimilations.
Chesbet and mafek are two precious substances, which accompany gold and silver in the inscriptions and which are closely related to each other. Thus, the four prophets at Denderâ each carry a censer: the first in gold and silver, the second in chesbet (blue), the third in mafek (green), the fourth in tehen (yellow). Now, chesbet and mafek do not designate metals in the modern sense, but colored minerals, whose name has often been translated by the words sapphire and emerald. In reality, the name of chesbet or chestereb applies to any blue mineral, natural or artificial, such as lapis lazuli, blue enamels and their powder, based on cobalt or copper, blue ashes, sulphate of copper, etc The chesbet is represented as a precious object on monuments, in the baskets and in the purses drawn therein: it is sometimes seen in long quadrangular blocks and in masses of several pounds. It was used to make ornaments, necklaces, amulets, inlays, which exist in our museums. He personifies the multicolored goddess, represented sometimes in blue, sometimes in green, sometimes in yellow, that is to say the goddess Hathor, and later, by assimilation, Aphrodite, the Greek goddess, and also Cypris, the Phoenician divinity. of Cyprus, which gave its name to copper. The annals of Thutmose III distinguish between true (natural) chesbet and artificial chesbet. The analysis of the blue glasses which constitute the latter, as well as that of the paintings removed from the monuments, have established that the majority were colored by a salt of copper. Some are by cobalt, as Hoefer's history of chemistry indicates, and as Mr. Clemmer's analysis of Egyptian pearls shows. This result is consistent with the facts recognized by Davy for Greek and Roman glasses. Theophrastus even seems to speak explicitly of cobalt blue, under the name of male blue, opposed to female blue. Theophrastus also distinguishes cyanos autophyès, or natural blue, from Scythia (lapis lazuli) and cyanos sceuastos, or imitation, made since the time of an ancient king of Egypt, and obtained by coloring a mass of glass with a copper ore taken in small quantities. The imitated blue had to be able to withstand fire; while the unheated blue apyros, i.e. natural copper sulphate, or rather azurite, was not durable. Vitruvius also gives the process of making blue of Alexandria, by means of sand, natron and copper filings, put into a paste, then vitrified in the fire: recipe which is found in the Greek alchemists, as shown by our quotes from Olympiodorus. We encounter here several notions of capital importance from the point of view which concerns us. First the assimilation of a colored material, precious stone, enamel, vitrified color, with metals; both of which are included under the same general designation. This assimilation, which seems strange to us, is explained both by the brilliance and the rarity which characterizes the two orders of substances, and also by the fact that their preparation was also carried out by means of fire, with the aid of dry process operations,
Let us also note the imitation of a natural mineral by art, which places the natural product and the artificial product in relation to one another: this imitation offers unequal degrees in the qualities and the perfection of the product. Finally we perceive a new notion, that of dyeing; because the imitation of natural sapphire is based on the coloring of a large mass, colorless by itself, but constituting the vitrifiable background, which is tinted with the aid of a small quantity of colored substance. With the enamels and colored glasses thus prepared, natural precious stones were reproduced; figures, earthen or stone objects were covered; metal objects were embedded. We will come back to all these circumstances, which are found in parallel in the history of the mafek.
Mafek, or green mineral, refers to emerald, green jasper, green enamel, green ash, green colored glass, etc. It is figured in the tombs of Thebes, in precious heaps, piled up with gold, silver, chesbet; for example, in the treasury of Ramesses III. Egyptologists have agitated the question of whether this name did not designate copper; as Champollion had first thought, an opinion which Lepsius rejects. I quote it, not to intervene in the question, but as a new proof of the close relationship of mafek with metals. The confusion is all the easier because copper is, as we know, the generator of a large number of blue and green materials. As with chesbet, there is a true mafek, which is emerald or malachite, and an artificial mafek, which represents enamels and colored glasses. The green color of the tombs and sarcophagi is formed by the dust of a vitrified copper-based material. The green of copper, malachite or false natural emerald, was called in Greek chrysocolla, that is to say gold solder; because of its application to this use (after reduction and production of an alloy containing a little gold and a fifth of silver, according to Pliny). It was the basis of green colors among the ancients. She found herself, again according to Pliny, in the gold and silver mines; the best species existed in the copper mines. It was made artificially, by running water in the mine shafts until June and leaving it to dry during the months of June and July. Current chemical theory easily explains this preparation, which is based on the slow oxidation of metal sulphides. The name emerald was applied by the Greeks, in a sense as comprehensive as that of mafek, to any green substance. It not only includes true beryl, which is often found in nature in large, lusterless masses; but also green granite, employed in obelisks and sarcophagi under the twenty-sixth dynasty; perhaps also green jasper. These minerals may have been used to cut the great emeralds, forty cubits long, which were in the temple of Ammon. It is on the contrary to a vitrified substance that the famous dishes of emeralds relate, regarded as of infinite price, which is in question at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages. Thus, in the treasury of the Gothic kings, in Spain, the Arabs found an emerald table, surrounded by three rows of pearls and supported by 360 feet of gold: this recalls the descriptions of the Thousand and One Nights. The great emerald dish, the Sacro Catino, has often been mentioned, plundered by the crusaders at the capture of Caesarea, in Palestine, in 1101, and which is still shown to tourists in the sacristy of the cathedral of Genoa. He has quite a legend. It was claimed to have been brought to Solomon by the Queen of Sheba. Jesus Christ would have eaten the paschal lamb with his disciples from this dish. It was long believed to be a real emerald; but doubts arose in the 18th century. The condamine had already tried to make sure of it by artifice, to the great scandal of the priests who showed this venerable monument. It was transported, in 1809, to Paris, where it was found that it was simply a colored glass, and it returned, in 1815, to Genoa, where it is still. The value attributed to such objects and their rarity can be explained if we observe that the manufacture of glass colored green, a difficult and costly operation, seems to have been abandoned under the Greeks and Romans. Pliny does not speak of this kind of vitrification, which was certainly in use in ancient Egypt, according to the microscopic examination of the colors used on the monuments. However we find among the receipts of the alchemical manuscripts a small treaty on the manufacture of glasses, where it is question, beside the blue glass, of the venetum glass, that is to say pale green. The confusion between a very diverse series of substances of green color also explains the peculiarity pointed out by Theophrastus, according to which the emerald would communicate its color to water, sometimes more, sometimes less, and would be useful for diseases of the eyes. These are obviously basic copper salts, which are partly soluble and can act as eye drops. The foregoing details again show the same denomination applied to a large number of different substances, assimilated moreover to metals: some natural, or sometimes capable of being produced in mines, by causing certain slow transformations, such is malachite; others are purely artificial. We can therefore conceive of the vagueness and confusion of the ideas of the ancients,
After the chesbet and the mafek, the list of Egyptian metals continues with a real metal, the chomt, a name translated, according to Lepsius, by copper, bronze, brass, and which can be recognized by its red color on the monuments. Champollion translated the same word by iron. This confusion between brass and iron is old. Already the Latin word Oes, brass, corresponds to the Sanskrit Ayas, which means iron. Here again the Egyptians included under the same domination a pure metal, copper, and its alloys, obtained more easily than copper by the metallurgical treatment of ores. Pure copper, indeed, was formerly met with rarely, though it exists natively: for example, in the deposits of the Lake Superior in America; and although it may be reduced from certain ores in a pure state. But it does not lend itself well to melting. In most cases, the reduction operates more easily on mixtures containing at the same time copper and tin bronzes, sometimes also lead (molybdochalcum of the ancients), and zinc orichalcum, brasses, in various relative proportions. Thence result alloys which are more fusible and endowed with particular properties, which especially constitute the brass of the ancients, the bronze of the moderns. The chomt is represented on Egyptian monuments in large plates, in fused parallelepipeds (bricks) and in rough fragments, not purified by fusion. The museums contain bronze mirrors (an alloy of copper and tin), locks, keys, spoons, nails, daggers, axes, knives, cups and objects of all kinds in bronze. Vauquelin has published analyzes of it, where it signals a seventh of tin. I had occasion to carry out myself, for Mariette, some analyzes of mirrors getting closer still to the composition of the most perfect bronze (a tenth of tin). Here comes to range the orichalcum, a word which seems to have represented among the Greeks all the yellow metallic alloys recalling gold by their brilliance. It was first used by Hesiod and by Plato. The latter speaks in his atlantis of a precious metal, which later became mythical for Aristotle, and which, according to Pliny, was no longer found in nature in his time. However the word is found, at the time of the Roman Empire and in the treatises of the Greek alchemists, to express brass, the alloy of cymbals and various others. He has come down to us in the disfigured archal wire denomination. Such is the indefinite variability of properties of materials formerly designated by one and the same name. These are, I repeat, circumstances which it is important not to forget, if we wish to understand the ideas of the ancients, by placing ourselves in the same set of habits and practical facts. The many alloys that we know how to make with copper, the ease with which we vary at will the hardness, tenacity, color, were particularly apt to give birth to the hope of transforming copper into gold. From there, these receipts to obtain a bronze color of gold, registered in the papyri of Leide and in our manuscripts. It is also said that an alloy similar to gold was found in the treasury of the Persian kings, which no analytical process, except the smell, made it possible to distinguish from it. The specific odor of these alloys, similar to that of primitive metals, struck the operators. We also find in an old recipe for diplosis, where it is a question of an artificial metal, these words: "The dye makes it shiny and odorless. Thus it seemed to the metallurgists of the time that there was but one step to do, a knack to achieve, one or two properties to modify to obtain the complete transmutation and the artificial fabrication of gold and silver". similar to that of primitive metals, had struck the operators. We also find in an old recipe for diplosis, where it is a question of an artificial metal, these words: "The dye makes it shiny and odorless. Thus it seemed to the metallurgists of the time that there was but one step to do, a knack to achieve, one or two properties to modify to obtain the complete transmutation and the artificial fabrication of gold and silver". similar to that of primitive metals, had struck the operators. We also find in an old recipe for diplosis, where it is a question of an artificial metal, these words: "The dye makes it shiny and odorless. Thus it seemed to the metallurgists of the time that there was but one step to do, a knack to achieve, one or two properties to modify to obtain the complete transmutation and the artificial fabrication of gold and silver".
After chomt comes men, later tehset, which M. Lepsius translates as iron. There is some uncertainty about this interpretation, the name of iron not appearing on the monuments vis-à-vis the figures of the objects which seem to be formed by this metal. This seems to be evidence of a recent character. Iron, in fact, is rare and relatively modern in Egyptian tombs. The paintings of the old empire do not provide an example of weapons painted in blue (iron), but always in red or light brown (brazen). Originally, helmets and breastplates were simply covered with leather with blades and rings of iron; which shows the original rarity of iron. None of this is surprising. It is known that the preparation of iron, its fusion, its work are much more difficult than those of other metals. So it came last into the world, where it was first known in the form of meteoric iron. The iron age succeeds the others, in the accounts of the poets. The use of iron was discovered after that of other metals, says Isidore De Seville. Brass was known before iron, according to Lucretius. The massagetae did not know iron, according to Herodotus; nor did the Mexicans and Peruvians, before the arrival of the Spaniards. The opinions which I have just expounded on the recent origin of iron in Egypt are the most accredited. However, I must say that M Maspero does not share them.
The taht or lead, the most vulgar of all, completes the list of metals figured by the Egyptians. We must understand under this name, not only pure lead, but also some of its alloys. According to the Greek alchemists, such as Pseudo-Democritus, lead was the generator of other metals; it was he who served to produce, by the intermediary of one of its derivatives, called magnesia by the authors, the three other congeneric metallic bodies, namely copper, tin and iron. With lead, silver was also made. This idea must have seemed quite natural to the metallurgists of old, who removed silver from argentiferous lead by cupellation.
Pewter, a singular circumstance, does not appear in Lepsius' list, although it enters into the composition of the bronze of the old Egyptians. Perhaps they did not know how to prepare it in isolation. It was not known in its pure state until later, during the time of the Greeks and Romans. But it was in common use in the time of the alchemists, as evidenced by the recipes of the Leide papyri. It was one of the fundamental materials employed for the alleged manufacture or transmulation of money, in these papyri, as in our manuscripts. This is why it is appropriate to speak here of the ancient cassiteros, a word whose meaning has changed, like that of brass, with the course of time. originally, in Homer for example, it seems that the cassiteros was an alloy of silver and lead, an alloy that readily occurs during the processing of lead ores. Later the same name was applied to pewter and its lead alloys. Similarly, in Hebrew, bedil means sometimes tin, sometimes lead, or rather some of its alloys. Tin itself was at first regarded as a sort of doublet of lead; it was white or silvery lead, opposed to black lead or lead properly speaking (Pliny). Its brilliance, its resistance to water and air, its properties, intermediate in some way between those of lead and those of silver, all these circumstances explain to us how alchemists have so often taken tin as a starting point for their transmutation processes. One of its most special properties, the cry or rustle that it makes heard when it is folded, seemed the first specific property that one had to endeavor to make disappear. Geber insists on it and the Greek alchemists are already talking about it. Tin alloys, such as bronze, orichalcum (copper alloys), and claudianon (lead alloy), also played a large role in the past. It will be noted that the alloys had specific names in antiquity, like the metals themselves. Let us also remember that the star associated with tin in the beginning was not the planet Jupiter, as it happened later, but the planet Mercury. The alchemical lexicons bear the trace of this first attribution. The sign of Jupiter was originally assigned to electrum. This planet, or rather its sign, seems to have possessed a generic meaning at one time; because the latter is added as an auxiliary sign to that of mercury, in a very old alchemical lexicon.
Mercury, which plays such a big role among alchemists, is ignored in ancient Egypt. But it was known to the Greeks and Romans. A distinction was even made between native mercury and mercury prepared by art, manufactured by virtue of a true distillation, which Dioscorides describes. Its liquidity, which the cold does not modify, its extreme mobility, which made it look like it was alive, its action on metals, its corrosive and poisonous properties are summed up by Pliny in two words: ... etc.; eternal liquor, poison of all things. Its primitive name is quicksilver, silver water, that is to say liquid silver. The metal took on the name and the sign of mercury, that is to say those of the hermetic body par excellence, only during the Middle Ages. In the Greek papyri of Leide, collected in Thebes in Egypt, the name of mercury is found associated with various alchemical recipes; precisely as in our manuscripts.
Blue and green minerals are the only ones listed in Egypt in the list of metals. However, mention should also be made of other Egyptian precious stones, such as chenem, ruby, red stone, enamel or red glass; nesem, a clear white substance; tehen, topaz, yellow jasper, enamel or yellow glass; sulfur in Coptic; the hertes, white color, milky quartz; perhaps also stucco, white enamel and other bodies equivalent to titanos, a word which means lime in Greek. These substances, which we would classify today alongside mafek and chesbet, did not, however, appear in Egypt: which again shows the diversity of the conceptions of the ancients, compared to ours.
To complete this subject and show the extent of the comparisons made by the first alchemists, it is appropriate to quote a list of the bodies associated with each metal Ek Tôn Metallicôn, the list of its derivatives, we would say; all bodies included under the fundamental sign of metal, as we would do today in a treatise on chemistry. This list seems very old, for it immediately precedes that of the Egyptian months in Ms 2327 (Fol 280); it includes the seven signs of the metals, assimilated to the seven planets; she notices strange connections. In truth, the word lead is followed by that of litharge and claudianon (alloy of lead and tin), which are directly related to it, and the word iron by those of magnet and pyrites. But on the other hand, the pewter sign cassiteros includes at the same time coral, any white stone, which recalls enamels; then sandarac, sulfur and the like. Under the sign of gold appear, with this metal, the carbuncle, the hyacinth, the diamond, the sapphire and analogous bodies; i.e. the brightest and most expensive gemstones. After the copper sign chalkos, we read pearl, onyx, amethyst, naphtha, pitch, sugar, asphalt, honey, gum ammonia, incense. The emerald sign includes jasper, chrysolite, mercury, amber, olibanum, mastic. The place assigned to mercury is significant. Indeed, this metal does not appear as a leader in the old list of metals; but it is attached to a previous heading, that of the emerald (chesbet), of which it seems to have taken the place later in the symbolic notation. Finally, the sign of money embraces glass, white earth and similar things. This list establishes, I repeat, curious comparisons whose reason with our current ideas is difficult to explain. There seems to be here the indication of some general table of substances, arranged under a certain number of headings drawn from the names of the metals; something like the catalogs of white and yellow attributed to Democritus. The analogies that presided over the construction of such classifications are difficult to find today. However, let us remember that the use of comprehensive signs and words has always existed in chemistry. Those who will read, in a few centuries, the generic word ether, applied to bodies as dissimilar as ordinary ether, whalebone, oils, nitroglycerine, cotton powder, cane sugar, without knowing the theories intended to group all these bodies, united under the definition of a common function, will they not also experience some embarrassment? Be that as it may, it will be noticed that precious stones are joined to metals in the old alchemical list, as well as in the basic list of the ancient Egyptians. The names of the metals include in fact lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, emerald, silver: it is the same association as that of the Egyptian metals, according to Lepsius. nitroglycerine, cotton powder, cane sugar, without knowing the theories intended to group all these bodies, united under the definition of a common function, will they not also experience some embarrassment? Be that as it may, it will be noticed that precious stones are joined to metals in the old alchemical list, as well as in the basic list of the ancient Egyptians. The names of the metals include in fact lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, emerald, silver: it is the same association as that of the Egyptian metals, according to Lepsius. nitroglycerine, cotton powder, cane sugar, without knowing the theories intended to group all these bodies, united under the definition of a common function, will they not also experience some embarrassment? Be that as it may, it will be noticed that precious stones are joined to metals in the old alchemical list, as well as in the basic list of the ancient Egyptians. The names of the metals include in fact lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, emerald, silver: it is the same association as that of the Egyptian metals, according to Lepsius. it will be noticed that precious stones are joined to metals in the old alchemical list, as well as in the basic list of the ancient Egyptians. The names of the metals include in fact lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, emerald, silver: it is the same association as that of the Egyptian metals, according to Lepsius. it will be noticed that precious stones are joined to metals in the old alchemical list, as well as in the basic list of the ancient Egyptians. The names of the metals include in fact lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, emerald, silver: it is the same association as that of the Egyptian metals, according to Lepsius.
In what places and by what processes were metals and shiny substances, artificial precious stones and vitrifications, which were assimilated to metals, prepared in Egypt? This is what we do not know in a precise manner. Agatharchides tells us, in truth, which were the centers of metallurgical exploitation. But it is rather, in his story, the extraction of metallic ores and their treatment on the spot, than the chemical industries proper. These seem to have been exercised in general near the sanctuaries of Ptah and Serapis. The operators who took care of transmutation were the same as those who prepared the drugs. The association of this diverse knowledge has always come under the same general system of theories. Even today, the same scholars cultivated both inorganic chemistry, the science of metals and glasses, and organic chemistry, the science of remedies and dyes. In Egypt, moreover, chemical processes of all kinds were carried out, as well as medical treatments, with the accompaniment of religious formulas, prayers and incantations, reputed to be essential to the success of operations as well as to the cure of illnesses. Priests alone could perform both orders of ceremonies, practical and magical. However, until now, we have not found the trace of the old laboratories which were to be devoted to the manufacture of metals, glasses and precious stones. The only clue that we know of is due to an observation by M Maspero, of which he was kind enough to entrust me with the details. The discovery was made by natives, at Drongah, half an hour's walk SSW of Siout, at the foot of the mountain, in a Moslem cemetery, established in the middle of one of the quarters of the ancient necropolis. In an excavation made to look for gold, and continued to the heart of the rock itself, we came across a kind of rockslide; we met at the bottom, at a depth of 12 to 13 meters, a funerary chamber, belonging to a deep burial and already violated. There we entered a room that had served as a laboratory, and whose walls were smoky. The following items were found there: a bronze stove; a bronze door, 0.35 m high, from a larger oven; about fifty bronze vases fitted with an unclosed channel spout, each in a sort of truncated cone, also in bronze, and whose upper orifice was wider. This cone recalls our sand baths; but the use of the vases themselves is unknown. There were also several alabaster basins; a rounded vase, coming from the old empire, in diorite or green jasper; alabaster spoons; low-grade gold objects, weighing 96 dirhems, composed of pieces having the appearance of ribbons in large rolled up sheets; as well as a mummy mask, distorted and folded. These gold objects looked like objects looted and prepared for smelting. The whole seems to constitute a workshop from the 6th to the 7th century AD, having belonged to a counterfeiter or an alchemist: it was much the same then. In a corner of the room, we saw a greasy and blackish earth which the assistants hastened to carry away, saying that they were going to use it to whiten the copper: in other words, they looked at it as projection powder, capable of changing copper into silver. We see by this prejudice that the secret tradition of alchemy is not yet lost in modern Egypt. The dyeing of metals. Thus the Egyptians brought together in the same list and in the same group the real metals, their alloys and certain colored or shiny minerals, some natural, others artificial. The same workmen treated one and the other by the processes of cooking, ie of the dry way. The glass, enamel, alloys were highly developed in Egypt and Assyria, as shown by the accounts of the ancients and the examination of the remains of their monuments. This assimilation between metals and precious stones was based both on industrial practices and on the properties of the bodies themselves. It seems to derive its origin from the brilliance of the color, from the inalterability, common to these various substances. The very names of certain metals in Greek and Latin, such as electros, that is, brilliant; silver called argyrion, that is to say the white, in Hebrew the pale; the name of gold, which is also called brilliant in Hebrew, recalls the aspect under which rare metals first appear to men and excite their greed. In the accidental melting of ores: produced at the time of the burning of the forests: "They saw them solidify on the ground with a brilliant color and carried them away, seduced by their brilliance". They were also found in river beds, associated with precious stones. The Egyptians did not have, any more than the ancients in general, this notion of definite species, of bodies endowed with invariable properties, which characterizes present-day science; such a notion does not go back beyond the present century in chemistry. Hence the multiple and variable meaning of the names of substances employed in the ancient world. This being admitted, as well as the possibility of imitating certain bodies more or less perfectly, according to current experiments on vitreous materials and alloys, this possibility was extended to all, by an apparently legitimate induction. The extractions of most metals and the effective reproductions of glasses and alloys taking place in general by the action of fire, following pulverizations, fusions, calcinations, more or less prolonged coctions, it is conceivable that an attempt has been made to operate in the same way to reproduce all the metals. This is not all: the imitation of precious stones by enamels and glasses presents very different degrees. Likewise, alloys vary in their properties and are more or less like real metals. We have seen that this was so with brass, which eventually became our copper, but which also meant bronze; for cassiteros, which eventually became our pewter, but also meant brass and lead alloys. We therefore conceive the origin of this notion of imperfect and artificial metals, possessing the color, the hardness, a certain number of the properties of perfect natural metals, without achieving them completely. Thus the fabrication of gold-colored bronze figures in the papyri of Leide, as well as in our manuscripts. It was a question of completing these imitations to make real gold, real silver, possessing all their specific properties, natural gold, as Proclus says. The claim to double the proportion of gold (or that of silver), by associating it with another diplosis metal, by processes which are mentioned at the same time in the papyri of Leide, in Manilius, and in our manuscripts; this claim, I say, implies the idea that gold and silver were alloys, alloys that it was possible to reproduce and multiply, developing in the mixtures a metamorphosis analogous to fermentation and generation. It was believed that it was possible at the same time, by suitable tricks of the hand, to modify the properties of these alloys at will. Such modifications are indeed likely to occur in metallurgical practice, with the help of quenching and by the addition of certain ingredients in small quantities, as shown in the manufacture of bronzes and steels. This research was encouraged by deeper philosophical theories. This is the place to recall the words of Bacon: "Observing all the qualities of gold, it is found to be yellow in color, very heavy and of such specific gravity, malleable and ductile to such a degree , etc..., and he who will know the formulas and the processes necessary to produce at will the color yellow, the great specific gravity, the ductility, etc.; he who will then know the means of producing these qualities in different degrees, will see the means and will be able to take the necessary measures to unite these qualities in such and such a body: whence will result its transmutation into gold". The Egyptians continually oppose the natural substance and the substance produced by art: precisely as it happens in the syntheses of organic chemistry of our day, where the identity of the two orders of matter constantly requires a special demonstration.The main idea of the Greek alchemists, in the books they left us is to modify the properties of metals by suitable treatments, to dye them gold and silver; and that, not superficially in the manner of painters, but in an intimate and complete way. They were guided in this search by the practices of their time. The practices for dyeing fabrics and glasses purple, for coloring bronze with gold, and for effecting transmutation, are in fact brought together in the papyri of Leide, as well as in pseudo-Democritus. According to the Greek alchemists, the sacred science comprises two fundamental operations: xanthosis, or the art of dyeing yellow, and leucosis, or the art of dyeing white; the authors of our manuscripts keep coming back to this subject. Some even add melanosis, or the art of dyeing black, and iosis, or the art of dyeing violet. "The dyeing art, says Pélage, that is, dyed in gold; then to play the role of dyes with respect to metals. In the library of the chemical philosophers of Salmon, work published at the end of the XVIIth century and which represents the science of the alchemists after fifteen centuries of culture, the philosopher's stone is defined: "The universal medicine for all imperfect metals, which fixes what 'the volatile, purifies what is impure in them, and gives them a more brilliant tint and luster than in nature'. This idea of a dye, of a coloring principle, of a xerion projection powder endowed with considerable tinctorial power, was in fact in conformity with the analogies drawn from the dyeing of fabrics, that of enamels and vitreous materials. "The royal purple is extracted from the alkanet (anchusa) and the sorrel (phycos). It is dyed yellow, after having dyed white, in the dyeing of gold, silk, skins. Before to dye purple, you have to whiten it first". We see how the alchemists were both guided and misled by the comparisons borrowed from industrial fabrications. Similarly, a trace of copper, that is to say one and the same coloring matter, can tint the glass blue or green, according to the nature of the compositions and according to recipes already known to the ancients. We see how the alchemists were both guided and misled by the comparisons borrowed from industrial fabrications. Similarly, a trace of copper, that is to say one and the same coloring matter, can tint the glass blue or green, according to the nature of the compositions and according to recipes already known to the ancients. We see how the alchemists were both guided and misled by the comparisons borrowed from industrial fabrications. Similarly, a trace of copper, that is to say one and the same coloring matter, can tint the glass blue or green, according to the nature of the compositions and according to recipes already known to the ancients.
They found a confirmation of these ideas in certain observations of the alchemists, relative to the tinting of metals; for there are, they say, agents which whiten Venus (like mercury which whitens copper); but this is an imperfect dye which does not resist fire. Other agents (sulphur, arsenic and their compounds) yellow the moon, ie silver; but this is still an imperfect imitation. We therefore distinguished for metals, as for fabrics and glasses, the processes suitable for dyeing them thoroughly and the processes suitable for dyeing them superficially. Thus to gild copper or silver, that is to say to dye these metals on the surface, gilding by amalgamation was used, already known to Vitruvius; or else one operated by means of an alloy of gold and lead. On the contrary, the processes for dyeing metals thoroughly, in their mass and their intimate essence in a way, congeneric processes of the formation of alloys, such as bronze and brass, were reputed to be more mysterious. The very name of orpiment Auri Pigmentum, which today designates arsenic sulphide, but which had a more confused meaning for the ancients, recalls the dyeing of gold. These analogies also explain why Democritus, author of works on the tinting of glasses and on the purple tinting, was later regarded as the inventor of the tinting of metals. Among the works that we possess, the same treatises deal with both the dyeing of metals, from that of glasses and that of fabrics. We see how the idea of the very manufacture of metals and that of transmutation flowed from Egyptian industries and ideas relating to the preparation of metals, alloys, enamels, glasses and colored fabrics. This is even what is clearest in the technical descriptions of the manuscripts. It is none the less a strange and difficult thing to understand today, such a mixture of real and positive recipes, for the preparation of alloys and vitrifications, and of chimerical processes, for the transmutation of metals. Both are expounded with the same title and often with the same naivety, stripped of all charlatanistic paraphernalia, in the papyri of Leide and in certain parts of our manuscripts. While tricksters and impostors often exploited these beliefs, it is no less certain that they were sincere among most followers. Here arises a singular question. How could this experience, which claimed to have a positive and tangible result and which always ultimately failed, come to meet with such persistent and prolonged faith? It would be difficult to explain this if we did not know with what promptness the human mind embraces any prejudice that flatters its hopes of power or wealth, and with what credulous ardor it remains obstinately attached to them. The prestige of magic, the predictions of astrology, always associated with alchemy, are no less chimerical. However, it is only nowadays and only in the West that they have lost their authority in the eyes of cultivated minds. Still, spiritualists and magnetizers are numerous, even in Europe. The successes of alchemy and its persistence are also linked to more philosophical causes. Indeed alchemy did not consist only in a certain set of recipes intended to enrich men; but the scholars who had cultivated it, in the time of the Alexandrians, had tried to make it a true science and to attach it to the general system of knowledge of their time. It is therefore now appropriate to rise higher and examine the theories by which the alchemists justified their processes and directed their experiments. These theories are metaphysical:
Alchemy did not come out solely and unaltered from the Egyptian world. It is after the fusion of the Greek civilization and the Egyptian civilization, in Alexandria, and at the time of their final dissolution, that we see appearing the first alchemical writings. There is a strange amalgamation of notions of various origins. alongside descriptions and purely empirical precepts, borrowed from the practice of chemical industries in antiquity, alongside the mystical imaginations, of oriental and Gnostic origin, which we have reported, we find there a whole body of philosophical doctrines, stemming from the Greek philosophers, and which constitute properly speaking the theory of the new science. The double aspect, both positive and mystical, of chemistry, the profound significance of the transformations whose laws it studies are shown here first of all. These philosophical comparisons are not arbitrary; we are led to it by the very text of the Greek alchemists. Not only do they relate to Democritus, by virtue of a suspect tradition; but Zosimus is a Gnostic, imbued with the ideas of Plato whose life he had written. The first authors whose names are found in the history of their time, such as Synesius, Olympiodorus, Stephanus, are philosophers properly speaking, belonging to the Neoplatonic school. Olympiodorus and Stephanus cite the Pythagoreans, the Ionian school and the Eleatic school, schools which they knew very well. Their scholars, the Christian philosopher and Anonymous, comment on the same sources. The ideas of these first alchemists have since passed to Arabs, then to Westerners; now, I repeat, they are connected by incontestable links with those of the Ionian school and especially with the ideas of Plato; I will presently give demonstrative proofs on these two points. Let us now quote the letter written in the 11th century by Michael Psellus to the patriarch Xiphilin, which serves as a kind of preface to the collection of Greek alchemists: "You want me to introduce you to this art which resides in fire and furnaces and which exposes the destruction of matter and the transmutation of natures. Some believe this to be insider knowledge, kept secret, which they have not attempted to bring into a rational form; which I regard as a enormity. For me, I first sought to know the causes and to derive a rational explanation of the facts. I looked for it in the nature of the four elements, from which everything comes by combination and in which everything returns by dissolution... I saw in my youth the root of an oak changed into stone, preserving its fibers and all its its structure, thus participating in the two natures ", that is to say, wood and stone. What Psellus attributes to the effect of lightning. Then he quotes, according to Strabo, the properties of a encrusting fountain which reproduced the shapes of the submerged objects. "Thus the changes of nature can occur naturally, not by virtue of an incantation or a miracle, or a secret formula. There is an art of transmutation. I wanted to explain to you all the precepts and all the operations. The condensation and rarefaction of materials, their coloring and their alteration: what liquefies glass, how rubies and emeralds are made; what natural process softens all stones: how the pearl dissolves and leaves in water; how it coagulates and forms into a sphere; what is the process for bleaching it; I wanted to reduce all this to the precepts of art. But as you do not allow us to dwell on superfluous things, you want me to limit myself to explaining by what materials and by the aid of what science one can make gold. You want to know its secret, not to have great treasures, but to penetrate into the secrets of nature; like the ancient philosophers, whose prince is Plato. Thus alchemy was for its adepts a positive science and a philosophy; it relied on the doctrines of the sages of Greece. Let us specify this filiation.
Thalès De Milet (around 600 BC) and the Ionian school in his wake were the first to free up the scientific conception of nature, of the mythical language, under which it was enveloped by the religious symbolism of the Orient. According to Thales, who seems to have drawn his opinions from Babylonian myths, water is the raw material from which everything came. Anaximenes (6th century before the Christian era), guided by an initial view of the general phenomena of nature, maintains for his part that air is the principle of things: rarefied, it becomes fire; condensed, it successively forms clouds, water, earth, stones. To these rather vague notions, drawn from a first sight of nature, succeed deeper insights. Parmenides and the Eleatics, cited by Zosimus and followed by Chymès, admit the permanence of the primordial substance. Everything is reduced to a single, eternal, motionless essence. The alchemists say the same: the whole comes from the whole, that is the whole composition. This is expressed even more strongly by the mystical axioms inscribed in the concentric circles of the serpent: "One is the whole, through it the whole is; if the whole does not contain the whole, it is not the whole" . Heraclitus (around the year 500) is struck, on the contrary, by the aspect of the necessary change in things. Fire changes into water by condensation; and water in earth; the earth on its side becomes liquid again, and this evaporated reproduces fire, etc. Thus nothing ever remains in its form. Nothing remains, everything becomes and changes, everything is continually created by the forces acting in the flow of phenomena. The appearance of persistence is that the parts flowing from one side are replaced on the other by the influx of other parts in the same proportion. What lives and moves in nature is fire, the soul or breath, a mobile and perpetually changing principle, the first substance of things. These ideas strangely resemble those which serve today as the foundation of our physical theories on the incessant exchange of elements in their compounds, on the transformation of forces, and on the mechanical theory of heat. Empedocles (in the middle of the 5th century BC) specifies more and seeks to reconcile the permanence of substances with the perpetual change of appearances. What appears to us as the beginning or the end of a being is only an illusion; in reality, there is nothing but mixture, reunion, combination, opposed to separation, to decomposition. The elements of which all things are composed consist of four different, uncreated and imperishable substances: earth, water, air and fire. Empedocles is the founder of the doctrine of the four elements, already glimpsed by his predecessors, but to which he gave its definitive formula. This doctrine presided over all chemistry until the end of the last century. The four elements indeed respond to the appearances and general states of matter. Earth is the symbol and support of solidity and dryness. Water, obtained either by igneous fusion or by dissolution, is the symbol and support of liquidity and even cold. Air is the symbol and support of volatility and the gaseous state. Fire, even more subtle, responds both to the substantial notion of the ethereal fluid, the symbolic support of light, heat, electricity, and to the phenomenal notion of the movement of the last particles of bodies. These were therefore, for Empedocles and his successors, the elements of all things. Thus Aristotle tells us: "Flesh, wood contain potentially earth and fire, which can be separated". The alchemists designated the four elements by a single word: tetrasomia, which represented the matter of bodies. They arranged the latter into several classes or categories, depending on whether they participate more or less in one of the elements. To the fire are attached the metals and what results from the art of coction (igneous way); in the air, the animals that live there; to water, fish; earth, plants, etc. The establishment of the catalogs of these four classes was attributed to Democritus, an assertion which has nothing implausible. These ideas recall those of Stahl and his contemporaries on phlogiston and on the bodies connected with it, such as metals and combustibles. To clarify further, it seemed useful to me to translate in extenso the passage in which Olympiodorus formally refers to the conceptions of the first Greek schools and compares them with the theories of the alchemists. Fire is the first agent, that of the entire art. It is the first of the four elements. Indeed the enigmatic language of the ancients on the four elements relates to art. May your virtue carefully examine the four books of Democritus on the four elements; it's about physics. He speaks sometimes of soft fire, sometimes of violent fire and coal and everything that needs fire; then from the air, from everything that derives from the air, from the animals that live in the air; likewise from the waters, from the bile of the fish, from all that is prepared with the fish and the water; in the same way he speaks of the earth and of what is connected with it, the salts, the metals, the plants. He separates and classifies each of these objects, according to color, specific and sexual characteristics, male or female. Knowing this, all the ancients veiled the art under the multiplicity of words. Art indeed has complete need of these data; apart from them, nothing is certain. Democritus says it, we cannot build anything solid without them. Know then that according to my strength I wrote, being weak not only in speech, but also in mind; and I ask that by your prayers you prevent divine justice from being irritated against me for having had the audacity to write this work, and that it be favorable to me in any way. The writings of the Egyptians, their poetry, their doctrines, the oracles of the demons, the exhibitions of the prophets deal with the same subject... now test your sagacity. Several names have been used for divine water. This divine water designates what one seeks and the object of research has been hidden under the name of divine water. I will show you a little reasoning, listen, (you who are) in possession of all virtue; for I know the torch of your thought and the merit good; I want to place before your eyes the spirit of the ancients. Philosophers, they hold the language of it and they came to art by wisdom, without in any way veiling philosophy; they all wrote clearly. Wherein they failed in their oath, for their writings deal with doctrine and not with practical works. Some of the natural philosophers relate reasoning about the elements to principles, since principles are something more general than elements. Indeed to the first principle is reduced the whole of art. Thus Agathodemon, having placed the principle in the end and the end, in the principle, wants it to be the serpent ouroboros... that is obvious, O initiate... Agathodemon, what is he? Some believe that he is an ancient, one of the oldest personages who occupied themselves with philosophy in Egypt; others say it is a mysterious angel, good genius of Egypt; others have called it heaven, and perhaps they say this because the serpent is the image of the world. Indeed certain Egyptian hierogrammats, wishing to trace the world on the obelisks, or to express it in sacred characters, draw the serpent ouroboros; his body is studded with stars. It is, I have been told, because it is the principle. Such is the opinion set forth in the book of chemistry, where we retrace its figure. I am now seeking how it happens that the principle is something more universal than the elements. Let us say what is for us an element and at the same time what is the principle. The four elements are the principle of the bodies, but not every principle is therefore an element. Indeed the divine, the egg, the intermediary, the atoms are for some (philosophers) the principles of things; but they are not elements. Let us therefore seek, according to certain signs, what is the principle of things, whether it is one or multiple. If it is unique, is it immobile, infinite, or determined? If there are several principles, the same questions arise: are they immobile, determined, infinite? The ancients admitted a single, immobile and infinite principle of all beings. Thalès De Milet speaks of the egg _ it is about divine water and gold; _ it is a principle one, beautiful, motionless; it is free from any apparent movement; he is moreover infinite, endowed with infinite power and no one can count his powers. Parmenides also takes the divine as a principle, a single principle, immobile, with determined power; it is, he says, one, immobile, and the energy which derives from it is determined. We notice that Thalès De Milet, considering the existence of the god, says him infinite and endowed with infinite power. God is indeed endowed with infinite power. Parmenides says that for his productions the god has only a determined power; everywhere indeed it is obvious that what God produces responds to a limited power. Perishable (things) respond to a limited power, with the exception of intellectual things. These two men, I mean Thales Of Miletus and Parmenides, Aristotle seems to reject them from the chorus of physicists. Indeed they are theologians, occupying themselves with questions foreign to physics and attaching themselves to the immobile; while all physical things move. Nature is the principle of movement and rest. Thales admitted water as the sole, determined principle of things, because it is fertile and plastic. It is fertile, since it gives birth to fish; and plastic, since we can give it the shape we want: in whatever vase we put it, it takes the same shape, whether the vase is polished, in terracotta, triangular or quadrangular, or what you want . This (unique) principle is mobile; water indeed moves, it is determined and not eternal. Diogenes held that the principle is air, because he is rich and fruitful; because he begets the birds. The air, too, shows itself to be plastic; we give it the shape we want. But he is one, mobile and not eternal. Heraclitus and Hippasus maintained that fire is the principle of all beings, because it is the active element of all things. A principle must indeed be the source of the activity of the things issuing from it. As some say, fire is also fruitful; because the animals are born in the heating. As for the land, no one has made it the principle, except Xenophanes De Colophon. As it is not fruitful, no one has made it an element. And let him who is in possession of all virtue notice that the earth is not pointed out as an element by the philosophers, because it is not fruitful. This relates to our research. Indeed, Hermès associates the idea of the earth with that of the unfertilized virgin. Anaximenes professes that the principle of things, infinite and mobile, is air. He speaks thus: the air is close to the incorporeal and we enjoy its effluvium; it must be infinite to produce, without ever losing anything. Anaximander says that the principle is the intermediary; meaning wet vapors and fumes. Wet steam is intermediate between fire and earth; it is, in a word, the intermediary between hot and humid. The smoke is intermediate between hot and dry. Let us come to the opinion of each of the ancients and see how each wants to direct his teaching from his point of view. here and there some omission has taken place, owing to the complication of the speeches. Let us recapitulate in parts and show how our (alchemical) philosophers, borrowing from them the point of departure, have constructed our art of nature. Zosimus, the crown of philosophers, whose language has the abundance of the ocean, the new seer, generally following Melissus on art, says that art is one, like God. This he expounds to Theosebia in innumerable places, and his language is truthful. Wanting to free us from false reasoning and from all matter, he exhorts us to seek our refuge in the one god. He speaks thus to this woman philosopher: sit there, recognizing that God is unique and the art unique, and do not go wandering looking for another god; for God will come near you, he who is everywhere, and not confined in the lowest place, like the devil. Rest your body and calm your passions; you will then call the divine to you, and the divine essence spread everywhere will come to you. When you know yourself, you will also know the essence of the one god. Doing so, you will attain truth and nature, despising matter. Likewise Chymès follows Parmenides, and says "one is the whole; by which the whole is; for if it did not contain the whole, the whole would be nothing". Theologians talk about divine questions, like physicists about matter. Agathodemon, turned towards Anaximenes, sees the absolute in the air. Anaximander said that this absolute was the intermediary, that is to say the moist vapor and the smoke. For Agathodémon it is quite the sublimated vapor. Zosimus and most others followed this opinion, when they made the philosophy of our art. Hermès also talks about smoke, about magnesia. Separate them, he says, in front of the furnace... the smoke of the "kobathia" being white, whitens the bodies (metals). Smoke is intermediate between hot and dry, and here is placed the sublimated vapor and all that results from it. Wet steam is intermediate between hot and humid; it designates humid sublimated vapours, those distilled by stills and the like. Such were the ideas of the alchemists on the constitution of matter. But their opinions varied, as well as those of the Greek philosophers, on the natural role and the reciprocal transformations of the elements. the smoke of the "kobathia" being white, whitens the bodies (metals). Smoke is intermediate between hot and dry, and here is placed the sublimated vapor and all that results from it. Wet steam is intermediate between hot and humid; it designates humid sublimated vapours, those distilled by stills and the like. Such were the ideas of the alchemists on the constitution of matter. But their opinions varied, as well as those of the Greek philosophers, on the natural role and the reciprocal transformations of the elements. the smoke of the "kobathia" being white, whitens the bodies (metals). Smoke is intermediate between hot and dry, and here is placed the sublimated vapor and all that results from it. Wet steam is intermediate between hot and humid; it designates humid sublimated vapours, those distilled by stills and the like. Such were the ideas of the alchemists on the constitution of matter. But their opinions varied, as well as those of the Greek philosophers, on the natural role and the reciprocal transformations of the elements. Wet steam is intermediate between hot and humid; it designates humid sublimated vapours, those distilled by stills and the like. Such were the ideas of the alchemists on the constitution of matter. But their opinions varied, as well as those of the Greek philosophers, on the natural role and the reciprocal transformations of the elements. Wet steam is intermediate between hot and humid; it designates humid sublimated vapours, those distilled by stills and the like. Such were the ideas of the alchemists on the constitution of matter. But their opinions varied, as well as those of the Greek philosophers, on the natural role and the reciprocal transformations of the elements.
Empedocles, as we have said, regarded the elements as subsisting by themselves. Their mixtures and their separations give rise to all natural bodies; but they themselves do not become, that is to say, they are not capable of being formed. On the contrary, other philosophers imagine, in accordance with the ideas of the Ionians, that the elements change into each other: "joining air to fire, earth to water, they first admit that fire changes into air, this into water, water into earth; and all the elements, by an inverse process, result in their turn from the earth...". These general notions take in the Pythagoreans an apparently more precise form. Indeed, to these somewhat vague outlines, they oppose mathematical and geometric conceptions. They all derive from unity, considered as the generator of numbers, that is to say of beings. Zosimus and the alchemists express by the same formulas the perfect manufacture of projection powder. Numerical combinations were supplemented, as in our modern sciences, by geometry. Indeed, according to Philolaüs (around 450 BC), the earth is made up of the cube, the fire of the tetrahedron, the air of the octahedron, the water of the icosahedron, and the fifth element, which includes the others and who is the link, by the dodecahedron. The fifth element seems to reappear in Aristotle, although in a more questionable way. Stephanus also speaks of it, and it became in the Middle Ages the origin of the quintessence of alchemists. Plato reproduces all these ideas of the Pythagoreans, and we find them set forth in detail in Stephanus of Alexandria. They recall our current conceptions of the structure of bodies: crystalline structure, which is a positive fact; atomic structure, which is representative fiction. The human mind needs to create an immutable and sensitive base for its conceptions, this base was purely fictitious. The mobile and transformable elements of Heraclitus had already become the fixed elements of Empedocles, and these had taken on a figurative and visible form in the eyes of the Pythagoreans. This is how the Greek mind was led to the doctrines of the atomists, Leucippus and Democritus (end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth century before our era). According to these, being consists of an infinite number of small corpuscles or atoms, indestructible and indivisible, who move in the void. They constitute matter in itself, the multiple substance that fills space. The atoms are distinguished from each other by their form, by their size, their order, their situation. The combinations of atoms and their separation are the cause of production and destruction. "The same elements constitute the sky, the sea, the land, the rivers, the sun; the same atoms also constitute the fruits of the earth, the trees, the animals; but they move and mix with each other in various ways" . Their various arrangements, their movements, their permutations constitute all things. The atoms are the principles of the elements: fire is formed of round and small atoms; while the other elements are a mixture of atoms of various kinds and sizes. The atomic theory, adopted later by the Epicureans, has come down to us, and it is still professed today by the majority of chemists. It therefore seems that it was by a sort of natural affinity that the alchemists related their origins to Democritus. However, in fact, it is the experimenter and the magician, rather than the theoretical philosopher, who is targeted by them. Indeed, in the writings of the Greek alchemists, as in those of the Middle Ages, there is no question of the atomic theory, contrary to what one might have thought. The very name of atom is, so to speak, never pronounced by them, and in any case, never commented. We know, moreover, that the Epicurean and Stoic doctrines, which played such a great part in Rome, were almost ignored in Alexandria. It is with the Ionian school, with the Pythagoreans and especially with Plato, that the alchemists are connected, by a constant tradition and by express theories; theories that came up to the end of the 18th century.
The theories of the alchemists have a strange character; they deviate so much from our current ideas, that they can hardly be understood, unless we go back to their origins and the conceptions of their contemporaries. Now, these are none other than the Alexandrians and the Neoplatonists, around the time of Diocletian and Theodosius, that is to say around the 3rd and 4th centuries, as I have established above. It is therefore to the ideas that philosophers had of matter at that time, ideas derived from those of Plato, that we should refer to. The opinions of the Greek alchemists have a singularly striking affinity with those expressed by Plato in the Timaeus; it is easy to verify this, by comparing Plato's theories with those of Zosimus, Synesius, and especially of Stephanus of Alexandria. According to Plato, it is necessary to first distinguish the raw material. "The thing that receives all the bodies never leaves its own matter; it is the common fund of all the different matters, being devoid of all the forms that it must receive from elsewhere". He compared it to odorless liquids, intended to serve as a vehicle for various perfumes. It is by itself neither earth, nor air, nor fire, nor water, nor a body born of these elements. This raw material thus receives the forms of the four elements, with which God composes the world. He composes it with fire, without which nothing visible can ever exist; with the earth, without which there can be nothing solid and tangible; between two and to bind them, he placed water and air. These elements themselves have a geometric shape, which allows them to fit together only according to certain ratios. Plato reproduces here the statements of Philolaüs, according to which the earth is the cube, the water the icosahedron, the air the octahedron. The corpuscles of fire are the smallest, the sharpest, the most mobile, the lightest. Those of the air are less so; those of water, even less. We shall presently see Stephanus, in the seventh century of our era, returning to these ideas; we still find the reflection of it in the imaginations of the chemists of the seventeenth century on the causes of the combination of acids with alkalis. The theories of the atomist school, even today, invoke analogous geometric representations. Plato's elements seem to be able to be changed into each other. Indeed, says Plato again, "We think we see that condensing water becomes stone and earth; in merging and dividing, it becomes wind and air; ignited air becomes fire; condensed and extinguished fire resumes form of air; thickened air changes into mist, then flows into water; from water form earth and stones". The four elements are generated periodically. This doubtless comes from the fact that it is necessary to see there only the various manifestations of the first matter. Plato does not say so expressly; but Proclus, in his commentary on the Timaeus, explains that "Things never being able to retain a nature of their own, who would dare to affirm that one of them is such rather than such another?" It is in conformity with these ideas that Geber, the master of the Arab alchemists in the VIIIth century, exposes that one cannot operate the transmutation of metals , unless we reduce them to their raw material. Plato's primitive elements or bodies are widespread in natural bodies, without any of these answering exactly to this or that element. "We will give the name of fire to the appearance of fire prevalent in all kinds of objects; likewise the name water, etc. When we see something constantly passing from one state to another, fire for example, we must not say that it is fire, but that such an appearance is that of fire; nor that it is water, but that such an appearance is that of water... if someone formed in gold all imaginable figures, kept changing each of them into all the others and, showing one of these forms, asked what it is, the surest answer would be that it is gold. It is the same with the thing which receives all the bodies. It receives all objects, without changing its own nature; it is the common base of all the different matters, without having other forms or movements than those of the objects which are in it". A similar conception, with the same vagueness and the same comprehensive character, presided over the definition of the phlogiston of Stahl in the 18th century. This phlogiston represents par excellence the matter of fire, considered in itself and in isolation, and it represents this same matter existing in combustible bodies, such as hydrogen, coal, sulphur, metals. Platonic ideas therefore prevailed, on this point, until the moment of the foundation of modern chemistry. Even in the 19th century, that is to say today, the word fire presented four meanings, namely: caloric, that is to say the igneous element, the so-called imponderable fluid, reputed to constitute matter of fire, distinct from that of bodies; the matter of the burning body: "Touch not the fire; the central fire"; the current state, that is to say static, of the body in combustion: "The house seemed all on fire"; finally the very act of ignition, of combustion, considered in itself and in its dynamic evolution: "propagation of fire, setting fire, etc.,
Likewise, in the alchemical writings, the word water has four meanings: the supposed element, whose union with the bodies would communicate to them the liquid state, that is to say the liquid element, the matter of the liquidity in general. The particular material currently liquid or liquefiable, such as water, fusible metals; the current and static state of the molten substance; finally, the dynamic act of liquefaction in general, that is to say fusion itself taking place, considered in its dynamic evolution; idea similar to the previous one. These notions may seem subtle; but if we do not refer to it, we cannot understand either Plato or the ancient alchemists. Let us go further into the doctrines of the Timaeus on the composition of bodies. It is here, as Plato is careful to explain, of conceptions which are personal to him and which he exposes, so to speak, playing with himself. However, they seem to have older and more general roots. The language and ideas of the alchemists are moreover connected with it in the most direct way. These are the various manifestations of the four elements. Let's start with the fire. According to the Timaeus: "Many kinds of fire have been formed, the flame, what comes out of it and which gives light to the eyes without burning, and what remains in the inflamed bodies after the flame is extinguished. "Similarly in the air, there is the purest part which is called ether, the most turbid part which is called mist and clouds, and other nameless species. Water first divides into two species, the one that is liquid and the one that is fusible. The liquid species, composed of small and unequal parts of water, can be easily moved by itself and by other bodies. The fusible species, composed of large and similar parts, is more stable, heavy, compact; the fire penetrates it and dissolves it and it flows; but if it withdraws, the mass draws together, re-establishes itself in its identity with itself and it freezes. Of all these bodies which we have named fusible waters, that which is formed from the smallest parts and which has the greatest density, this genus of which there are not several species, the color of which is a dazzling yellow, the most precious treasures, gold, has condensed, filtering through the stone. The species of fusible water which is formed by the union of parts almost as small as those of gold, but which has several species, which surpasses gold in density, which contains a small part of very tenuous earth and which is for this reason harder than gold, but which is lighter because of the great intervals which are found in its mass, it is a kind of brilliant and condensed water which is called brass. But when, over time, the part of earth it contains separates from it, becoming fusible by itself, it takes the name of rust ". We recognize here the waters of Zosimus the Panopolitan and of the first alchemists, as well than the meaning hidden under these strange words which we have reproduced above. Plato says again, in a language easy to understand: "Water mixed with fire, that which, unbound and fluid, receives, because of this movement, the name of liquid... this water, when it is separated from fire and air and isolated, becomes more uniform, is compressed by the exit of these two bodies and condenses... it constitutes, depending on the circumstances, hail, ice, snow or frost. distilled through the plants that the earth produces, generally receive the name of juices, etc. "He then distinguishes four main species of water which contain fire: the juice which warms the soul and the body is ie wine; the food and pleasant species, that is to say the honey (sweet species); finally the kind of juice which dissolves the flesh and which, by the heat, becomes frothy. This last species, wrongly translated by Cousin and by Henri Martin by the word opium, is obscure; but the other three are not. As for the species of earth, Plato distinguishes them in the same way, according to the proportion of water which they contain and according to the equality and the uniformity of their parts, in stone, basalt, tile, salt finally. I reproduce only what concerns the last kind. "When this earth is deprived of a great part of the water which was mixed in it, but is composed of the thin parts and is salty, there is also formed a semi-solid and susceptible body. to dissolve again in water: thus is produced, on the one hand, natron, which is used to wash away oil and earth stains; on the other, this body which it is so useful to mix with the substances united to flatter the palate, the salt, this body loved by the gods...". When the earth is not condensed with force, there is only the water which can dissolve it; but, when it is compact, there is only fire, for it is the only body which can penetrate it. "The bodies which contain less water than the earth are all the species of glass, and all kinds of stone called fuses; others, on the contrary, contain more water in their composition: these are wax-like and aromatic bodies". contain the true origins of alchemical theories. this body loved by the gods...". When the earth is not condensed with force, there is only water that can dissolve it; but, when it is compact, there is only fire , because it is the only body which can penetrate there. “The bodies which contain less water than the ground are all the species of glass, and all the species of stone which one names fuses; others, on the contrary, contain more water in their composition: these are wax-like and aromatic bodies". contain the true origins of alchemical theories. this body loved by the gods...". When the earth is not condensed with force, there is only water that can dissolve it; but, when it is compact, there is only fire , because it is the only body which can penetrate there. “The bodies which contain less water than the ground are all the species of glass, and all the species of stone which one names fuses; others, on the contrary, contain more water in their composition: these are wax-like and aromatic bodies". contain the true origins of alchemical theories. there is only fire, because it is the only body that can penetrate it. "The bodies which contain less water than the earth are all the kinds of glass, and all the kinds of stone which are called fuses; others, on the contrary, contain more water in their composition: these are the wax-like and aromatic bodies". I thought it useful to give in extenso these passages from the Timaeus of Plato, because they seem to me to contain the true origins of alchemical theories. there is only fire, because it is the only body that can penetrate it. "The bodies which contain less water than the earth are all the kinds of glass, and all the kinds of stone which are called fuses; others, on the contrary, contain more water in their composition: these are the wax-like and aromatic bodies". I thought it useful to give in extenso these passages from the Timaeus of Plato, because they seem to me to contain the true origins of alchemical theories.
It is easy, in fact, to see the relationship between the ideas of the Timaeus and those which are presented in our quotations from the first alchemists, contemporaries and pupils of the Neoplatonists. This filiation is shown in an express way by the writings of Synesius and Stephanus of Alexandria. We read, for example, in Synesius' commentary on Democritus. "Bodies are composed of four things, and the things attached to them; and what are these things? Their raw materials are their souls. As the craftsman shapes wood into a seat, or a chariot, or something else, and only modifies the matter, giving it nothing more than form: likewise brass is fashioned into a statue, into a rounded vase. Thus operates our art; likewise mercury, worked by us, takes all kinds of forms; fixed on a body formed of the four elements, it remains firm: it has a powerful affinity". The faculty of amalgamation, of universal action of mercury constantly worries our author. A little before he says: "Mercury takes forms, just as wax attracts all color; thus the mercury whitens everything, attracts the soul of all things... it changes all the colors and subsists itself, while they do not subsist; and even if it does not subsist in appearance, it remains contained in the bodies". Here we see the reappearance of the notion of the fundamental quality, taken for an element, a substance properly so called; and that of the raw material, constituting, in properly speaking, the soul of bodies. The very comparison of the latter, made by Plato, with the gold used in the work of the craftsman, is found applied to wood. Only the metaphysical notion of Plato's universal raw material is transformed and concretized in some way, by an artifice of materialistic metaphysics that we find in the chemical philosophy of all times: it is identified with the mercury of the philosophers. This is an entirely new and very original notion, a notion that is moreover older than Synesius, if it is true that Dioscorides had already declared, around the time of the Christian era, that "some regard mercury as contained in all metals". The origin of this opinion is easy to see, by recalling that Plato designates under the name of waters all liquid bodies and all fusible bodies, notably gold and copper. The molten metals indeed offer a remarkable appearance and properties, similar to those of ordinary mercury. It is not surprising that these common characteristics were attributed to a special substance, in which resided par excellence, it was said, metallic liquidity: it was one of the momentary attributes of the mercury of the philosophers. Mercury, joined to sulfur and toarsenicphilosophers, symbols of other fundamental qualities, properly speaking constitute the chemical elements, as Geber formally declares in the eighth century. Stephanus of Alexandria (around 630) comes even closer than Synesius to the ideas and language of Timaeus and the Pythagoreans. He is an enthusiastic and mystical author, like the Gnostic alchemists Zosimus and Synesius. He strongly believes in the unlimited power of science. "Science can do everything, he says; it clearly sees the things that cannot be seen and it can accomplish the impossible things". He is also a Christian Neoplatonist, who begins by invoking the Holy Trinity. "The multitude of numbers, says Stephanus again after the Pythagoreans, is composed of a single unit, indivisible and natural, which produces it ad infinitum, dominates it and embraces it, because this multitude flows from unity. It is immutable, immobile; the numbers result from its circular and spherical development". In the same way Zosime already wrote: "Everything comes from unity; everything fits there; it engenders everything". Stephanus further explains: "That God made the universe with four elements...these four elements (air, fire, earth and water), being contrary to each other, cannot unite, if not by the interposition of a body which possesses the qualities of the two extremes: thus quicksilver fire joins water through the intermediary of earth, that is, say slag... water is joined with the fire of quicksilver by the air of copper etc. The fire, being hot and dry, generates the heat of the air and the dryness of the earth. Damp and cold water generates the humidity of the air and the coldness of the earth; the cold and dry earth begets the cold of water and the dryness of fire, etc. Conversely, hot moist air begets heat from fire and moisture from water, etc." Related medical theories, on cold and hot, dry and wet, blood and bile, are here intertwined and manifest the profession of Stephanus.The preceding words still recall those of Plato: “It is therefore of fire and earth that God must have formed the universe; but it is impossible to unite two bodies well without a third, because between them there must be a bond which brings them both together. We still find the application, materialized in a chemical sense, from a notion of Platonic metaphysics; a notion which reappeared in the last century under the name of the plastic mediator, interposed between the soul and the body. Stephanus elaborates further, still in Pythagorean language; he shows the numerical relations which establish a mystical relationship between alchemy and astronomy, another order of conceptions no less interesting in the history of science. After establishing that each of the four elements, having two qualities, results from the association of three elements, two of which are associated with itself and which it retains; he adds: "That makes twelve combinations, resulting from four elements taken three by three: this is why our art is represented by the dodecahedron, which corresponds to the twelve signs of the zodiac". The four seasons respond to the four elements, the four regions of the human body, etc. Likewise the seven transformations, the seven colors, the seven planets. The relations established by the demiurge, another Platonic conception, between the metals and the planets are developed further. But let us finish exposing what is relative to the transformation of matter, according to Stephanus. "You have to strip the material (of its qualities), draw the soul from it, separate it from the body, to arrive at perfection... copper is like man: it has a soul and a body... what is its soul and what is its body? The soul is the most subtle part..., that is to say the tinctorial spirit. The body is the heavy, material, earthly thing endowed with a shade... after a series of suitable treatments, copper becomes shadowless and better than gold... shadow must be expelled from matter to obtain pure and immaculate nature... matter must therefore be stripped, and how to strip it? Except by the igneous remedy (mercury). And what is stripping? If it is not to impoverish, corrupt, dissolve, put to death and take away from it all its own nature and its great mobility; so that the spirit, subsisting and manifesting the tinctorial principle, may be rendered capable of combining to accomplish the operation sought (i.e. the tinting of metals or transmutation)... the nature of matter is to be both simple and compound... it receives a thousand names, and its essence is one, etc. The elements become and are transmuted, because the qualities are contrary and not the substances. Elsewhere: "We must first divide the matter, blacken it, then whiten it; then the yellow coloring will be stable". And again: "Hear by fire the mercury and the igneous remedy: this mercury burns, corrupts and exhausts the bodies, etc.". We find the sentence of Mary the Jewess and the word of Pliny: "Mercury, poison of all things". These semi-metaphysical explanations are interwoven in the author with the account of real operations, the meaning of which is sometimes very clearly perceived. Thus, Stephanus recounts in mystical language the combat of copper and mercury...copper is bleached and corrupted by mercury. This one is fixed by its union with the copper, etc... the copper does not dye, but it receives the dye, and after having received it, it dyes (the other bodies). This seems to relate both to the formation of metallic alloys of various shades and to the coloring of glasses and enamels by salts of copper, resulting from the prior dissolution of the metal. The author also refers to the preparations of the Egyptians and adds: "A single type of stone can be made with many stones of various species; this is how statues, animals, glasses, colors (enamels or colored glasses)". We are touching here on the positive facts and the industrial practices which served as a basis for the theories of the alchemists. We see how they deduced from it the notion of the first matter, one and polymorphous, such as we find it in Plato, in Aeneas of Gaza, in Zosimus, in Pelagius, in Stephanus. They clarify their idea, sometimes by comparisons drawn from the art of craftsmen, which give a diverse appearance to a single material; sometimes, by deeper assimilations, borrowed from the chemical industries of dyeing and the manufacture of glass and enamels. We are therefore brought back by these philosophical theories to the very ground to which the practical study of the Egyptian metals, of their alloys and of the brilliant stones, natural and artificial, had led us, ranged alongside the metals in the same family of substances.
Alchemy was a philosophy, that is to say a rationalist explanation of the metamorphoses of matter. Nowhere, in the methods of the first Greek theoreticians who have come down to us, does the miracle appear; although the magic formulas seem to have been mixed with the practices, during the beginnings of science, at the time of Zosimus for example. But they seem to have disappeared, at the same time that the theory properly so called developed. Michel Psellus formally declares that the destructions and transformations of matter are made by natural causes, and not by virtue of an incantation and a secret formula. through the mystical explanations and the symbols with which the alchemists wrap themselves, we can glimpse the essential theories of their philosophy; which are reduced in sum to a small number of clear, plausible ideas, and some of which offer a strange analogy with the conceptions of our time. All the bodies of nature, according to the Greek adepts, are formed by the same fundamental matter. To obtain a determinate body, gold for example, the most perfect of metals, the most precious of goods, it is necessary to take analogous bodies, which differ from it only by some quality, and eliminate what particularizes them; so as to reduce them to their raw material, which is the mercury of the philosophers. This can be drawn from ordinary mercury, by first removing its liquidity, that is to say a water, a fluid and mobile element, which prevents it from reaching perfection. It is also necessary to fix it, to remove its volatility, that is to say an air, an aerial element that it contains; finally some profess, as Geber will do later, that it is still necessary to separate from mercury an earth, an earthly element, a coarse scoria, which opposes its perfect attenuation. One operated in the same way with lead, with tin; in short, the aim was to strip each metal of its individual properties. It was necessary to remove from lead its fusibility, from pewter its particular cry, on which Geber insists a great deal; the mercury indeed takes away its cry from the pewter, says Stephanus also. The raw material of all metals being thus prepared, I mean the mercury of the philosophers, it only remained to dye it with sulfur and arsenic; words under which one confounded at the same time the metallic sulphides, various congeneric inflammable bodies, and the quintessential matters which the philosophers claimed to derive from them. It is in this sense that metals were viewed in Arab times, as compounds of sulfur and mercury. Tinctures of gold and silver were said to have basically the same composition. They constituted the philosopher's stone, or powder of projection (xerion). Such, I believe, is the theory that can be glimpsed through these symbols and these obscurities; theory partly drawn from practical experiences, partly deduced from philosophical notions. Indeed, matter and its qualities are conceived as distinct, and these are considered as particular beings, which can be added or made to disappear. In the presentations of the adepts, there reigns a triple confusion between substantial matter, as we conceive it today; its states, solidity, liquidity, volatility, considered as special substances, superadded, and which would even be, according to the Ionians, the true elements of things; finally, the phenomena or acts manifested by matter, in their double static and dynamic form, such as liquefaction, volatilization, combustion, acts themselves assimilated to the elements. There are therefore at the bottom of all this certain metaphysical ideas, to which chemistry has never been foreign. In the last century, a capital step was taken in our conception of matter, as a result of the separation brought between the substantial notion of the existence of ponderable bodies and the phenomenal notion of their qualities, considered until then by the alchemists as real substances. But to understand the past, we should refer to previous opinions which seemed clear to cultivated minds barely a century ago. The doctrines of the alchemists and Platonists in this respect differ so much from ours that it requires a certain effort of mind to place us back in the intellectual milieu which they were intended to reproduce. However, it is indisputable that they constitute a logical whole, which has long governed scientific theories. These doctrines, which we already see in pseudo-Democritus, in Zosimus, and more clearly still in their commentators, Synesius, Olympiodorus and Stephanus, find themselves exposed in the same terms by Geber, the master of the Arabs, and after him, by all the hermetic philosophers. Not only the materials employed by these in transmutation: sulphur, silver, tutia, magnesia, marcasite, etc., quite recall those of pseudo-Democritus and his Greek successors; but Geber says formally that one cannot succeed in transmutation, if one does not reduce the metals to their first matter. The human mind has stubbornly clung to these theories, which have served as a basis for many real experiments. This was also the doctrine of the whole Middle Ages. In the writings attributed to Basil Valentine, writings that date back to the 15th century, the author likewise affirms that the spirit of mercury is the origin of all metals, and we find this doctrine in the library of the chemical philosophers of Salmon, at the end of the seventeenth century. Hence this disappointing hope of transmutation, a hope maintained by the vagueness of ancient knowledge; it rested on the incontestable appearance of an indefinite cycle of transformations, reproducing itself without beginning or end, in chemical operations. This needs to be developed if we want to understand the origin and scope of the ideas of the ancient chemists. hope maintained by the vagueness of ancient knowledge; it rested on the incontestable appearance of an indefinite cycle of transformations, reproducing itself without beginning or end, in chemical operations. This needs to be developed if we want to understand the origin and scope of the ideas of the ancient chemists. hope maintained by the vagueness of ancient knowledge; it rested on the incontestable appearance of an indefinite cycle of transformations, reproducing itself without beginning or end, in chemical operations. This needs to be developed if we want to understand the origin and scope of the ideas of the ancient chemists.
I take an ore of iron, or one of its oxides so widespread in nature; I heat it with coal and limestone and I obtain metallic iron. But this in its turn, by the sudden action of fire on contact with the air, or by the slow action of atmospheric agents, reverts to the state of an oxide, identical or analogous with the primitive generator. Where is the primordial element here, judging by appearances? Is it iron, which disappears so easily? Is it the oxide, which existed at the beginning and is found at the end? The idea of the elementary body would seem a priori to be more suitable for the last product, as a correlative of stability, of resistance to agents of all kinds. This is how gold first appeared the accomplished term of metamorphoses, the perfect body par excellence: not only because of its shine, but above all because it resists chemical agents better than any other metal. The simple bodies, which are today the certain origin and the basis of the chemical operations, are not, however, at first sight distinguished from the compound bodies. Between a metal and an alloy, between a combustible element, such as sulfur or arsenic, and resins and other inflammable combustible compounds, appearances cannot establish a fundamental distinction. Simple bodies in nature do not bear a label, if we may so express it, and chemical mutations do not cease to take place, from the moment they have brought these bodies to light. Subjected to the action of fire or the reagents which caused them to appear, they disappear in their turn; by giving rise to new substances, similar to those which preceded them. We thus find in chemical phenomena that indefinite rotation in transformations, the fundamental law of most natural evolutions; both in the order of mineral nature and in the order of living nature, both in physiology and in history. We understand why, in the eyes of the alchemists, the mysterious work had neither beginning nor end, and why they symbolized it by the annular serpent, which bites its tail: emblem of nature always one, under the mobile background of appearances . We thus find in chemical phenomena that indefinite rotation in transformations, the fundamental law of most natural evolutions; both in the order of mineral nature and in the order of living nature, both in physiology and in history. We understand why, in the eyes of the alchemists, the mysterious work had neither beginning nor end, and why they symbolized it by the annular serpent, which bites its tail: emblem of nature always one, under the mobile background of appearances . We thus find in chemical phenomena that indefinite rotation in transformations, the fundamental law of most natural evolutions; both in the order of mineral nature and in the order of living nature, both in physiology and in history. We understand why, in the eyes of the alchemists, the mysterious work had neither beginning nor end, and why they symbolized it by the annular serpent, which bites its tail: emblem of nature always one, under the mobile background of appearances .
However, this image of chemistry has ceased to be true for us. By a rare exception in the natural sciences, our analysis has succeeded in chemistry in laying bare the precise, indisputable origin of metamorphoses: an origin from which synthesis today knows how to reproduce at will the phenomena and the beings, of which it seized the generative law. An immense and unexpected progress has therefore been accomplished in chemistry: for there are few sciences which can thus recapture their origins. But this progress was not achieved without the long effort of human generations. It is by subtle reasoning, based on the comparison of an immense number of phenomena, that we have managed to establish a similar line of demarcation, today so sharp for us, between simple bodies and compound bodies. But neither the alchemists nor even Stahl made such a difference. There was therefore nothing chimerical, a priori at least, in their hopes. The dream of the alchemists lasted until the end of the last century, and I don't know if it still persists in certain minds. Certainly it has never had any positive experience as its foundation. The real operations performed by the alchemists, we all know them and we repeat them every day in our laboratories; for in this respect they are our ancestors and our practical precursors. We operate the same fusions, the same dissolutions, the same associations of minerals, and we also perform a multitude of other manipulations and metamorphoses that they were unaware of. But we also know with all certainty that the transmutation of metals is not accomplished in the course of any of these operations. Never has a modern operator seen tin, copper, lead change before his eyes into silver or gold by the action of fire, exerted by the most diverse mixtures; as Zosimus and Geber imagined themselves realizing it. Transmutation does not take place, even under the influence of the forces at our disposal today, forces more powerful and subtle than the agents known to the ancients. Modern discoveries in explosives and electricity provide us with both more energetic and profound agents that go far beyond anything known to the alchemists. These agents reach temperatures unknown before us; they communicate to matter in motion an activity and a vital force incomparably greater than the operations of the ancients. They give these movements a direction, a polarization, which make it possible to increase without fail and in a direction determined in advance the intensity of the forces presiding over the metamorphoses. By this very fact, we have obtained both this power over nature and this industrial wealth that the alchemists had dreamed of for so long, without ever being able to achieve it. Chemistry and mechanics have transformed the modern world. We transform matter every day and in all ways. But we have specified at the same time the limits at which these metamorphoses stop: until now they have never gone beyond our simple bodies or chemical elements. This limit is not imposed by any philosophical theory; it is a de facto barrier which our experimental power has not succeeded in overthrowing.
Lavoisier showed, a hundred years ago, that the origin of all known chemical phenomena can be clearly assigned and that it does not go beyond what he called, and what we call with him, simple bodies and indecomposable, metals in particular, whose nature and weight remain invariable. It is this invariability of the weight of the current elements which is the crux of the problem. The day when it was observed everywhere and demonstrated with precision, the ancient dream of transmutation vanished. In the cycle of transformations, if the reciprocal genesis of our elements is not considered impossible a priori, at least it is established today that this would be an operation of a completely different order from those which we know and which we have the current power to execute. Because, in fact, in none of our operations, the weight of the elements and their nature experience no variation. Our experiences on this point date back a century. They have been repeated and diversified in a thousand ways, by thousands of experimenters, without ever having been found faulty. The observed existence of such a radical difference between the transmutation of metals, so long hoped for in vain, and the fabrication of compound bodies, henceforth realizable by certain methods, suddenly threw a light. It was because of the ignorance in which people had remained in this respect until the end of the eighteenth century that chemistry had not succeeded in constituting itself as a positive science. The new concept demonstrated the inanity of the dreams of the old operators, inanity which their inability to establish any real fact of transmutation had already made suspect for a long time. Among the Greek alchemists, the oldest of all, doubt does not yet appear; but the skepticism already exists in the time of Geber, who devotes several chapters to refuting it in form. Since then, this skepticism had always grown, and good minds had come to the point, even before Lavoisier, of denying transmutation; not by virtue of abstract principles, but as a fact of effective and realizable experience. and good minds had come, even before Lavoisier, to deny transmutation; not by virtue of abstract principles, but as a fact of effective and realizable experience. and good minds had come, even before Lavoisier, to deny transmutation; not by virtue of abstract principles, but as a fact of effective and realizable experience.
The Multiples of Hydrogen and the Polymeric Elements.
Assuredly, this notion of the definitive and immutable existence of sixty-six distinct elements, such as we now admit them, would never have occurred to an ancient philosopher; or else he would have immediately dismissed it as ridiculous: it had to impose itself on us, by the inescapable force of the experimental method. Does this mean, however, that this is the definitive limit of our conceptions and our hopes? No, probably not: in reality, this limit has never been accepted by chemists except as a current fact, which they have always kept the hope of going beyond. Long works have been undertaken in this respect, either to reduce all the equivalents of simple fields to the same series of numerical values, of which they would be multiples; either to group them into natural families; or to distribute them in these, following arithmetic progressions. Even today, some, clinging to the atomic conception, regard our so-called simple bodies as formed by the association of a certain number of analogous elements; perhaps as generated by the condensation of only one of them, hydrogen for example, the one whose atomic weight is the smallest of all. We know that simple bodies are each characterized by a fundamental number, which is called its equivalent or its atomic weight. This number represents the chemical mass of the element, the invariable weight under which it enters into combination and associates with the other elements, sometimes according to multiple proportions. It is this constant weight which passes from compound to compound, in substitutions, decompositions and various reactions, without ever experiencing the smallest variation. The combination therefore does not operate in a continuous progression, but in whole relations, multiple of each other, and which vary by sudden leaps. Hence, for each element, the idea of a determined molecule, characterized by its weight, and perhaps also by its geometrical form. This molecule remaining indestructible, at least in all the experiments accomplished hitherto, it could be regarded as identical with the atom of Democritus and Epicurus. This is the basis of the atomic theory of our time. Thus each simple body would be constituted by a special atom, by a certain indivisible material particle. physical forces, as well as chemical forces, can cause this atom to experience only general movements, without the possibility of internal vibrations; these can only exist in a system made up of several parts. It also follows that there cannot be in the interior of an indivisible atom any reserve of immanent energy. Such are the rigorous consequences of the atomic theory. I limit myself to exposing them and I do not have to discuss here whether these consequences do not go beyond the premises, the positive facts which serve as their basis; that is to say, if the facts authorize the conclusion not only of the existence of certain determined molecular masses, characteristic of simple bodies, and which all chemists admit; but also to attribute to these molecules the name and properties of absolute atoms, as do a number of scholars. These reservations are all the more appropriate since the modern partisans of the atomic theory have almost immediately repudiated it in the interpretations they have given of the constitution of simple bodies: interpretations as hypothetical moreover as the very existence of atoms. absolute, but which attest to the continuous effort of the human mind to go beyond any demonstrated explanation of phenomena, as soon as such an explanation has been reached, and to soar further towards new imaginations. Let us trace this history: if it is no longer a question of a positive doctrine, nevertheless the presentation which we are about to make offers the interest which attaches to the conceptions by which the intelligence tries to represent the general system of nature. . We find here views analogous to those of the Pythagoreans, when they claimed to link in the same system the real properties of beings and the mysterious properties of numbers. The first and principal effort that has been attempted in this direction consists in bringing the equivalents or atomic weights of all the elements to the same fundamental unit. This is an a priori conception, which has given rise to a multitude of experiments, intended to verify it. If the theoretical fruit from this point of view has been minimal, if not even negative; in practice, at least, these works had a very useful scientific result: they fixed with extreme precision the real equivalents of our elements; that is to say, I repeat, the exact weights according to which the elements enter into combination and substitute themselves for each other. Fart, English chemist, had first proposed to take the very weight of one of our elements, that of hydrogen, as a unit; assuming that the atomic weights of all other simple bodies were multiples of it. This hypothesis, embraced and supported for some time by M. Dumas, reduces the whole theory to an extreme simplicity. Indeed, all simple bodies would then be constituted by the various arrangements of the atom of the lightest of them. Unfortunately, it did not resist experimental control, that is to say the exact determination, by analysis and synthesis, of the true atomic weights of our simple bodies. This determination furnished, besides some atomic weights nearly identical with the multiples of hydrogen, a multitude of other intermediate numbers. But in theoretical conceptions, no more than in practical life, man does not easily give up his hopes. To support Prout's supposition, his proponents tried first to halve, then to quarter, the fundamental unit. Now, to this term, an objection arises: it is that conclusive verifications become impossible. Indeed, our experiments do not have, whatever we do, absolute precision; and it is clear that any numerical conjecture would be acceptable, if the common unit of atomic weights were placed beyond the limit of errors which we cannot avoid. That's not all; the very bottom of the system is affected by this supposition. The reduction of the fundamental number, below a unit equal to the atomic weight of hydrogen, removes from the theory that precise and seductive character, by virtue of which all the elements were regarded as ultimately formed by more or less condensed hydrogen. We would have to go back into the unknown to a new element, four times lighter, an unknown element which would form hydrogen itself by its condensation. Still, this is not enough to rigorously represent the experiences. Indeed, Mr. Stas, by studies of incomparable accuracy, has shown that the system reduced to these terms, that is to say reduced to taking as a unit a low sub-multiple of the weight of hydrogen, the system, I say, cannot be defended. The extremely precise observations which he performed proved beyond question that the atomic weights of the elements are not expressed by simple numbers, that is to say linked together by rigorously defined whole relations. The theory of multiples of hydrogen is therefore not tenable, in its strict and rigorous sense. Let us beware, however, of too absolute a negation. If the hypothesis which admits the equivalents of the multiple elements of each other cannot be affirmed in an absolute way, however this hypothesis has for it singular observations and which demand, in any case, an interpretation. in this respect the facts which I am about to cite give food for thought. If the hypothesis which admits the equivalents of the multiple elements of each other cannot be affirmed in an absolute way, however this hypothesis has for it singular observations and which demand, in any case, an interpretation. in this respect the facts which I am about to cite give food for thought. If the hypothesis which admits the equivalents of the multiple elements of each other cannot be affirmed in an absolute way, however this hypothesis has for it singular observations and which demand, in any case, an interpretation. in this respect the facts which I am about to cite give food for thought.
In reality, there are certain elements which are comparable to each other and which at the same time have identical atomic weights. Such are cobalt and nickel, for example. These two metals are similar in most of their properties and they produce two series of parallel compounds when uniting with the other elements. Now here come new and more powerful analogies. Indeed such a parallelism in the reactions of two bodies and in those of their compounds, joined to the identity of their atomic weights, is not without example in science: in particular, it is not rare to meet it in the study of organic principles, such as the carbides of hydrogen, the essences of turpentine and lemon, for example; or alternatively tartaric and paratartaric acids. These two essences these two acids are formed of the same elements, united in the same proportions and with the same condensation, but yet with a different arrangement. Besides, the two carbides, the two acids are capable of generating parallel combinations: this is what we call isomeric bodies. But nickel and cobalt behave in exactly the same way. It is certainly strange to find such a comparison between compound principles, such as carbides or acids, and these two metals, these two bodies reputed to be simple: as if the two so-called simple bodies were also formed by the different arrangements of certain elementary subjects, simpler than themselves. Gold, platinum and iridium, other metals which constitute the same group, offer a similar numerical comparison, though less narrow in their derivatives, than that of cobalt and nickel. In cases of this kind, it seems, I repeat, that we are dealing with certain fundamental matters, identical as to their nature, but diversified as to the detail of their internal arrangements and their manifestations. Nevertheless, to be faithful to the rules of the sound scientific method, it is important to add immediately that hitherto chemists have never been able to change, by any process, either cobalt into nickel, nor gold into platinum or iridium. Let us pursue these comparisons: they extend further. Indeed, next to the isomeric elements come other elements, whose atomic weights are not identical, but linked in the same group by simple numerical relations, and multiple of each other. Oxygen, for example, can be compared to sulphur, in the combinations of these two elements with hydrogen and with the metals. Water and hydrogen sulphide, oxides and sulphides constitute two series of parallel compounds. Sulfur can even be compared even more strictly with selenium and tellurium: these are comparable elements, forming, I repeat, parallel combinations with hydrogen, with the metals and even with oxygen and most of the others. elements. Now, the chemical analogy of these elements is found in the numerical comparison of their atomic weights: the atomic weight of sulfur is substantially double that of oxygen; that of selenium is almost five times that of tellurium, and that of tellurium is eight times as considerable as that of oxygen, that is to say four times that of sulphur. Here again we find remarkable analogies in the study of the combinations of hydrogen carbides. These atomic weights of multiple elements from each other are reminiscent of polymeric bodies, that is, the condensed compounds of organic chemistry. Hydrogen carbides are known, formed of the same elements united in the same relative proportion, but such that their molecular weights and their gaseous densities are multiples of each other. Gasoline and acetylene, for example, are hydrogen carbides of this order: they are both formed by the association of one part by weight of hydrogen with six parts of carbon. But the vapor of benzine, under the same volume, is three times as heavy as that of acetylene. That's not all: benzine derives from acetylene, by direct condensation: it is its polymer. Conversely, we know how to transform these polymer compounds by experience in the opposite direction, returning from the condensed carbide to its generator; we know in particular how to transform benzine into acetylene, by heat and by electricity. This resemblance between polymeric carbides and simple bodies with multiple atomic weights immediately suggests the hope of transformations of the same order. If we modify the carbides of hydrogen, why could we not also modify the simple bodies which offer analogous numerical relations? Why couldn't we form sulfur with oxygen, form selenium and tellurium with sulfur, by suitable condensation processes? Why could tellurium, selenium not be reversely changed to sulfur, and this in turn metamorphosed into oxygen? Nothing, in fact, opposes it a priori: all the time, and this is essential, the experimental test, often tried, has failed until now. This criterion is empirical, it will be said; it is not based on any necessary demonstration and therefore its character is purely provisional. Without a doubt; but so it is with most, if not all, of our laws. Experience is the only certain criterion of modern science: it is the only barrier which guarantees us against the return of the mystical reveries of the past. However, we can push the demonstration further: because there is a positive and fundamental difference between the physical constitution of polymeric carbides, or compound radicals of organic chemistry, and that of the elements themselves, or true radicals of mineral chemistry: this difference is based on the observations of physicists relating to specific heats. According to their measurements, the quantity of heat necessary to produce the same effect, the same variation of temperature, on the hydrogen carbides, increases in proportion to their molecular weight. For gaseous benzine, for example, three times as much heat is required as for acetylene, taken in the same volume. However, the opposite happens for simple bodies that are multiple of each other: when they are taken under the same gaseous volume, or more generally under their respective molecular weights, the quantity of heat which produces the same variation in temperature in the simple bodies true remains exactly the same. For example, a liter of hydrogen and a liter of nitrogen absorb the same quantity of heat: an identity all the more striking because the weight of the second gas is fourteen times as considerable as that of the first. The work of heat is therefore very different in the two cases, depending on whether it is a question of simple bodies and of compound bodies, and it establishes an essential diversity between the true chemical elements, such as we know them today, and the effective polymers, that is to say the bodies obtained by the experimental condensation of the same compound radical. Assuredly there is here something of a quite particular order; there is a fundamental property, relating to the mechanical constitution of the final particles of bodies, which differentiates our present elements from compound bodies proper:
However, there is another notion, related to the previous one and no less remarkable, which contributes to maintaining our hopes on the synthetic generation of the elements: it is their classification into natural families, a classification first attempted by Ampère, clarified by Dumas, which has become increasingly important in recent years. Let us first cite a very characteristic example, I want to talk about the family of chloroids: it includes three indubitable terms: chlorine, bromine, iodine. These three elements, by their combinations with the metals and the other bodies, form three series of parallel compounds, symmetrical in their formulas and which often present the same molecular volume and the same crystalline form. From the chemical point of view, nothing is more similar to hydrochloric acid, as hydrobromic and hydroiodic acids: these are three powerful acids, generated in the same way by the union in equal volumes of the simple gases which compose them. Chloride, bromide, iodide of potassium, are also extremely analogous, crystallized in the same system, &c. The physical properties of these three elements are sometimes the same, and sometimes they vary in a regular fashion. To cite only one and the most apparent, I will recall that chlorine is yellow and gaseous, bromine red and liquid, iodine violet and solid. The physical properties of these three elements are sometimes the same, and sometimes they vary in a regular way. To cite only one and the most apparent, I will recall that chlorine is yellow and gaseous, bromine red and liquid, iodine violet and solid. The physical properties of these three elements are sometimes the same, and sometimes they vary in a regular way. To cite only one and the most apparent, I will recall that chlorine is yellow and gaseous, bromine red and liquid, iodine violet and solid.
Now, the molecular weights, that is to say the condensations of matter in gaseous form, increase from one to the other of these three elements. In fact, their respective atomic equivalents or weights, weights proportional to the gaseous condensations, are equal to 35.5 for chlorine, 80 for bromine, 127 for iodine. Not only do the weights thus increase by degrees; but these degrees offer a certain regularity: the equivalent or atomic weight of bromine being about the average between those of chlorine and iodine. The entire group constitutes what has been called a triad. Similar remarks have been made for other groups of elements: for example, for the family of sulphuroids, made up of oxygen, sulphur, selenium and tellurium, elements whose atomic equivalents or weights are approximately multiples of the same unit. These elements unite with hydrogen, forming gaseous compounds, acid compounds for the last three, and, in all cases, containing their own volume of hydrogen. These elements also combine with metals. The group formed by nitrogen, phosphorus,arsenicand antimony constitutes a third family, no less characterized, that of the azotoids, whose hydrogenated compounds are also gases, but contain one and a half times their volume of hydrogen. The atomic weights also increase following a regular progression. It is thus that we have been led to a true classification, assembling simple bodies according to principles of similarity similar to those which naturalists invoke in the study of the three kingdoms of nature. This classification seems even narrower in chemistry, because the general analogies, always a little elastic in natural history, are corroborated here by the comparison of the absolute numbers which represent the molecular weights: as if each family of elements were generated by virtue of a common generative law. Before going further, I must say that I develop these numerical comparisons and this notion of the generation of elements, taking care to preserve all their strength and without weakening them in any way. However, it would be misleading the reader not to warn him that the doubt arises, when one specifies completely. In reality, the comparisons on which such hopes are based are not absolutely rigorous, but only approximate. These are therefore approximates, rather than demonstrations; they are singular glimmers, perhaps real and of a nature to enlighten us on the true constitution of our simple bodies; but perhaps they are also misleading, perhaps they result solely from the equivocal play of numerical combinations. In short, I think it is permissible to see there, without leaving a wise reserve, the index of some law of nature, masked by secondary disturbances which have remained unexplained up to now: in my opinion, this kind of comparisons should not be discarded. But, I repeat, it would be dangerous to attach too strongly to them and to regard them as definitively acquired. The history of science proves that the human mind, once it accepts the approximate as a demonstration, in positive theories of natural phenomena and especially in numerical combinations, very quickly drifts towards the arbitrary fantasies of science. 'imagination. it would be perilous to attach too strongly to them and to regard them as definitively acquired. The history of science proves that the human mind, once it accepts the approximate as a demonstration, in positive theories of natural phenomena and especially in numerical combinations, very quickly drifts towards the arbitrary fantasies of science. 'imagination. it would be perilous to attach too strongly to them and to regard them as definitively acquired. The history of science proves that the human mind, once it accepts the approximate as a demonstration, in positive theories of natural phenomena and especially in numerical combinations, very quickly drifts towards the arbitrary fantasies of science. 'imagination.
One more step has been taken in this direction; a bold attempt, bordering perhaps on the chimera, has been made to construct numerical series, which include all the present simple bodies in their network and which even claim to embrace all the simple bodies likely to be discovered in the future. I mean parallel periodic series, or to use a more straightforward and more precise language, arithmetic progressions, according to which Mr. Chancourtois first, then Mrs. Newlands, Lothar Meyer and Mendeleef sought nowadays to group all the numbers which express the atomic weights of our elements, or bodies claimed to be such. It is again by the study of the series of organic chemistry that we have been led to such arithmetical progressions. Organic chemistry, indeed, is coordinated around a certain number of large series of bodies, linked to each other in each series by precise laws; I say bound not only by their formula and their properties, but also by their effective generation. The bodies comprised in each of these series can be formed by means of a single fundamental hydrogen carbide; the other terms derive from it methodically, by successive additions or substitutions of elements. The system of derivatives of a carbide recalls, and even more richly, the system of derivatives of a simple metal in mineral chemistry. There is more: here a new datum intervenes. The fundamental carbides are not isolated and independent of each other. In fact, they can be arranged in turn by regular groups, or so-called homologous series, series whose similar terms differ two by two by constant elements in kind, in number, and consequently in weight: the invariable numerical difference of these weights generally equals 14. These general relations are certain in organic chemistry. They coordinate, not only the formulas, but also the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen carbides and their derivatives. From then on it was a quite natural idea, and which must have occurred to more than one mind, to distribute all the mineral elements according to a principle of analogous classification, and similarly based on a system of constant differences. . Such is, in fact, the basis of the so-called periodic series. Tables are drawn up today in inorganic chemistry similar to those of organic chemistry; we assemble the elements, metals and metalloids, such as hydrogen carbides. There is however this difference, that the groups of hydrogen carbides are constructed a posteriori and according to the synthetic and positive experiments of organic chemistry; while the new groups of mineral elements are formed a priori and by purely hypothetical means. Anyway, a kind of table with two entries has been constructed: it includes all our known elements, classified according to certain arithmetic progressions. The natural families of the elements, as defined above, form the basis of this classification. Let us first recall the family of chloroids: it includes chlorine, bromine, iodine, to which fluorine has been added, the first term a little divergent. Actually, the numerical differences between the atomic weights of these four elements are represented by the following numbers: 16.5; 44, 5 and 47. These three differences constitute roughly a progression, the reason for which would be the number 16, or else the number 15. Similarly the family of sulphuroids, which includes oxygen, sulphur, selenium and tellurium, offers the following three differences between the atomic weights of its successive terms: 16; 47.6; 47.8; numbers very nearly multiples of 16: this is the same reason as before. Lithium, represented by 7, sodium by 23, potassium by 39.1, form a third group of elements, all metallic elements this time: we find there the same difference or approximate ratio, equal and 16. Let us come to the family of azotoids, such as nitrogen represented by 14, phosphorus by 31, arsenic by 75, antimony by 120. The reason for the increase here would be between 15 and 17, that is to say about the same, although still with notable differences in its absolute value. I say almost, and it is this almost perpetual that casts a shadow over the whole system. But let us continue with the summary, placing ourselves at a new point of view. The first family, that of the chloroids, includes elements characterized by a common chemical property, which dominates all their combinations: they are monovalent bodies, capable of combining preferably with equal gaseous volumes, that is to say with weight equal atoms with hydrogen and with the metals. On the contrary, the second family, that of the sulphuroids, oxygen, sulfur and the like, contains above all bivalent bodies, combining in the gaseous state with a volume of hydrogen double theirs, and, in a more general way, according to double ratios of atomic weights. in its turn, the family which contains nitrogen, phosphorus and the analogous elements is trivalent; each of these elements, taken under its respective atomic weight, combines with three atoms of hydrogen or other elements. Finally, we distinguish another quadrivalent series, formed by carbon, silicon, tin, etc.
These four series, characterized by the ratios of their combinations, embrace a multitude of known compounds. They recall certain general groups of hydrogen carbides. Indeed, some of these, such as ethylene, taken in the gaseous form, are capable of combining with an equal volume of hydrogen, chlorine and other elements. Other carbides, such as acetylene, are able to combine preferentially with a gaseous volume of hydrogen, chlorine, etc., twice theirs. Other carbides unite with a triple or quadruple volume of the elementary gases and especially of hydrogen, &c. Now, if we compare the monovalent, bivalent and trivalent hydrogen carbides, we recognize that we can group them in a very simple way, by arranging them by classes such, that in a class of carbides containing the same number of carbon atoms, the consecutive carbides differ from each other by two equivalents of hydrogen and, consequently, by atomic weights increasing by 2 in 2 units. This constant difference between the primordial terms of the various series is necessarily found between the following terms, that is to say between the terms of the homologous series compared with each other. The lightest carbides by their atomic weight, in each class containing a given number of carbon atoms, are at the same time the least saturated, those whose valence is the most considerable; for the valence increases in proportion to the number of hydrogen atoms united with the same quantity of carbon. These digital connections, this classification dominate all organic chemistry and they are based on experience. Now, strange thing! If we compare the primordial terms of each of the mineral families, characterized by distinct valences; if we compare among themselves, for example, the following four elements: quadrivalent carbon and represented by an atomic weight equal to 12; trivalent nitrogen and represented by atomic weight 14; divalent oxygen and represented by 16; finally monovalent fluorine and represented by 19; we notice immediately that these numbers differ from each other by progressively increasing numerical values, such as 2, 2 and 3: that is to say on average 2, a difference which is also that of the carbides of hydrogen of unequal valence. This constant difference of the primordial terms is thus found between the correlative terms of the various families of elements, in mineral chemistry, as well as between the corresponding carbides of the homologous families, in organic chemistry. That's not all. The family of lithium, which starts from the number 7, and some others, a little artificial perhaps, such as that of glucinium, which starts from the number 9, and that of boron, which starts from the number 11, provide as many heads of complementary file, whose atomic weights increase by 2 units, and complete filling the gaps remaining between the successive multiples of the number 16, common reason for all the progressions in the interior of each family of elements. We thus have two fundamental progressions: on the one hand, the great progression, whose terms increase as the multiples of 16, and which is applicable to the particular bodies comprised in each of the families; and, on the other hand, the small progression, increasing according to multiples of 2, and which is applicable to the families themselves, compared with each other in their corresponding terms. By combining these two progressions, a theoretical table is constructed, which contains all the atomic weights of simple bodies, distributed over the series of whole numbers, up to the limit of the highest atomic weights. Such is the system: I have presented it as a whole, with the ingenious artifices of its arrangements. However, in reality, the atomic weights of the elements of the four fundamental families, comprising about fifteen elements, are the only ones which are coordinated according to entirely probable relations. It is also possible to dispose of certain series of metals, such as the group formed by lithium, sodium, potassium. That done, there remained more than half of the known elements, which remained beyond any precise comparison. The authors of the system did not hesitate to group them too, so as to arrange them, each in its place, in their table. But it is easy for any unprejudiced mind to recognize that this last grouping rests on purely numerical comparisons, and which are far from having the same solidity as the preceding ones, even if they are not altogether arbitrary. Be that as it may, the comparisons that the system of periodic series brings about do not stop there.
These relations have been established for a long time in chemistry and prior to any arrangement of the elements in parallel series: they in no way depend on them, for they result from the absolute value of the atomic weights, and not from their periodic differences. However, as these relations are the immediate consequence of the atomic weights, the comparisons established between them are found, by a necessary counter-stroke, between their atomic volumes and between all the other correlative properties of the chemical mass of the elements. In such a way that the table of parallel series, once established, includes at the same time the fundamental physical properties of the elements: as would any grouping, whatever it was, of the same elements. This circumstance increases the convenience of the new table; although it does not bring any new demonstration to the existence of the periodic series: one must beware in this respect of any illusion. But let's move on and examine the predictions derived from the new classification. It is here especially that the system becomes interesting. It will be noticed that in the arithmetic progressions which include each family of elements, certain terms are missing. Between sulfur, 32, and selenium, 79 (i.e. roughly 80), there should be two intermediate terms, such as 48 and 64. Likewise between selenium, 79, and tellurium, 128, 2 terms are missing: 96 and 112. It is clear that these must be unknown elements and that should be sought. But as the number would have been too great, the authors of the system, hastened to fill in the gaps in each family, they first intercalated there elements already known, although manifestly foreign to the family, such as molybdenum, 96, inserted between selenium and tellurium; tungsten and uranium, added likewise after. to the series of lithium, 7, they also added hydrogen, 1, at the top, and at the end copper, 63, then silver, 108, and gold, 197. All this touches on fantasy. Likewise, between chlorine and bromine, between bromine and iodine, certain terms of the fundamental arithmetic progressions are missing: these are still hypothetical elements to be discovered. Let us observe here that their properties are not indeterminate. Indeed, the physical or chemical properties of an unknown element, or at least some of them can be predicted and even calculated a priori, as soon as the atomic weight is given, and better still the family, that is to say the analogies. But this prediction, as was said above, is not a consequence of the theory of periodic series; it results purely and simply from the laws and analogies formerly known, which are independent of the new system. Be that as it may, the hypothetical picture which I have just described, a picture which includes all the known simple bodies and all the possible simple bodies, has something seductive about it and which excites many minds. We have exposed it in all its clarity: but the time has come to present certain reservations. Indeed, it is impossible not to draw to the attention of the critic and the philosopher the convenient artifice, with the help of which the authors of the system succeeded in including in it not only all the known bodies, but even all the possible bodies. This artifice consists in forming their table with terms which do not ultimately differ by more than two units, terms narrow enough so that no new body, whatever it may be, can fall outside the meshes of the net. This is all the more certain since the periodic differences, or reasons for the progression, often include in their applications to the known atomic weights variations of 1 or 2 units. We see that it is no longer even a question here of those fractions of unity, which separated the multiples of hydrogen from each other, and which were objected to the hypothesis of Prout and Dumas; but we encounter much greater differences, the existence of which no theoretical explanation has been given, discrepancies whose existence deprives the new comparisons of a large part of their philosophical value. By tolerating such deviations, and by sufficiently multiplying the real or supposed terms of the comparisons, it will always be easy for the partisans of any system to declare themselves satisfied. Without absolutely excluding such conceptions, we must avoid attaching too great a scientific value to such elastic frameworks; we must above all beware of attributing to them past or future discoveries, to which they do not in reality lead in a precise and necessary manner. In fact, and to be sincere, we must say that apart from the ancient natural families of elements, recognized for a long time, these are hardly anything but artificial assemblages. The system of periodic series, no more than the system of multiples of hydrogen, has hitherto furnished no certain and definite rule for discovering either the simple bodies found in recent years, or those which we do not yet know. . None of these systems has provided a more positive method, which allows us to glimpse, even from a great distance, the synthetic formation of our elements; or which puts on the path of experiences by which one could try to reach it. Great illusions have arisen in this respect. It's not that such systems aren't useful in science; they serve to excite and sustain the imagination of researchers. These resign themselves with difficulty to remaining on the pure experimental terrain and they are pushed into the region of constructions and theories, by this need for unity and causality, inherent in the human spirit. So it would be too hard, and useless moreover, to want to proscribe any attempt of this kind. But, whatever the seduction exercised by these dreams, one should beware of seeing in them the fundamental laws of our science and the basis of its certainty, under penalty of falling back into a mystical enthusiasm similar to that of the alchemists.
Such conceptions, by the way, are too narrow and it is worth rising higher. Basically, those who invoke the multiples of hydrogen and the periodic series relate everything to the conception of certain atoms, smaller in truth than those of bodies reputed to be simple. Now, if it were to be demonstrated that the equivalents of actual simple bodies are rigorously multiples of each other, or more generally, multiples of certain numbers forming the ratio of determined arithmetic progressions; this would result in the probable conclusion that the actual simple bodies represent the unequal states of condensation of the same fundamental matter. This way of conceiving things has nothing that could be repugnant to a chemist versed in the study of his science. One could even invoke in this respect facts known to all, and which are not without some analogy. Such are the multiple states of carbon, an element which manifests itself in the free state in the most diverse forms and which engenders several series of compounds, corresponding to a certain extent to each of its fundamental states; just as the compounds of an ordinary element correspond to this element itself. Carbon represents in a way the common generator of a whole family of elements, differing in their condensation: it is moreover to the same conclusion that the study of hydrogen carbides had already led us. One could object that the diversity of properties of carbon does not go as far as the diversity of the elements included in the same family, that of the chloroids or that of the sulphuroids, For example. In fact, sulfur and selenium never reproduce the same compounds by uniting with oxygen, hydrogen or nitrogen; and they cannot be regenerated by the condensations of the simplest of them. While all the forms of carbon, whatever their variety, really represent the unequally condensed states of the same element: all these forms derive from gaseous carbon, a primordial state, the least condensed of all, and whose analysis spectral reveals the momentary existence at a very high temperature. However, perhaps this is a simple difference of degree in the ease of metamorphoses. In short, carbon, considered under its states and degrees of condensation, is by itself equivalent to an entire class of simple bodies. Oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium could represent in the same way, the various states of a common element. There is more: ozone, a body endowed with very singular specific properties comparable to those of a real element, was really formed by means of oxygen: its existence up to a certain point authorizes the preceding conjectures. Perhaps it is the same also with certain groups of metals: each of them answering by itself and by the particular series of its combinations to one of those states of carbon, which engender corresponding series of derivatives. There is this difference, however, I repeat, that the various states of carbon can all be reduced to certain identical compounds, such as carbonic acid, acetylene or formene; while sulfur, selenium, metals,
So far we have reasoned as if the actual elements were necessarily formed by the condensation of a simpler element, such as hydrogen or any other really existing and isolable element, whose individual properties would be the source of those of its combinations. . But this is not the only way of understanding the constitution of our simple bodies: it is important to extend our ideas in this respect, and to expose a more general philosophical conception. The fundamental identity of the matter contained in our present elements and the possibility of transmuting into each other the bodies reputed to be simple, could be accepted as probable hypotheses, without this resulting in the necessity of a truly isolable single matter. , that is, existing in a proper way. One of the hypotheses does not lead to the other as a forced consequence, contrary to what has been thought so far. This deserves special attention. Indeed, by admitting the unity of matter as established, we conceive that this one matter is susceptible of a certain number of states of stable equilibrium, outside of which it cannot manifest itself. The set of these stable states would contain the simple bodies known today, the simple bodies that we will be able to discover one day, and even form synthetically; assuming that we ever succeed in discovering its generating law. But we have always reasoned by assimilating these multiple states of equilibrium of matter to our current compound bodies, formed by the addition of simpler elements. However, we can conceive of things quite differently. It is possible that the various states of equilibrium, under which the fundamental matter manifests itself, are neither edifices composed by the addition of different elements, nor edifices composed by the addition of identical elements, but unequally condensed. . It does not seem necessary, in a word, for all these molecular structures to represent integer multiples of a small number of elementary weight units. One can just as easily imagine that such edifices offer, in relation to each other, generative relations of another order: such, for example, as the relations existing between the geometric symbols of the various roots of an equation; or more generally, between multiple values of the same function, defined by mathematical analysis. The fundamental matter would then represent the generative function, and the simple bodies would be its determined values. In this hypothesis, more comprehensive than those usually formulated on the constitution of matter; in this order of ideas, I say, a body deemed simple could be destroyed, but not decomposed according to the ordinary meaning of the word. At the moment of its destruction, the simple body would suddenly be transformed into one or more other simple bodies, identical or analogous to the current elements. But the atomic weights of the new elements could offer no commensurate relation with the atomic weight of the primitive body, which would have produced them by its metamorphosis. There is more: by operating under various conditions, we could sometimes see a system appear, sometimes another system of simple bodies, developed by the transformation of the same element. Only the absolute weight would remain invariable in the sequence of transmutations. According to this view, the bodies which would result from the metamorphosis of any one of our actual elements should not be considered as simple bodies in relation to it; I say to a title higher than the element which would have generated them. Because they too could be destroyed and transformed into one or more other bodies, always of the order of our present elements. Among these elements of new formation, one might even see the primitive body reappear, which would have given rise to the first metamorphosis. It would therefore no longer be a question here of compositions and decompositions, comparable to those we continually achieve in our operations. The notion of an essentially identical matter, although multiform in its appearances, and such that none of its manifestations can be regarded as the necessary point of departure for all the others, recalls in some respects the ideas of the ancient alchemists. It would offer the advantage of establishing a sharp line of demarcation between the constitution of our present elements and that of their known combinations. It would account for the difference which exists between the specific heat of the current elements and that of the compound bodies and polymeric carbides. It would moreover be perfectly reconciled with the dynamic hypotheses that are stated today on the constitution of matter. The various simple bodies, indeed, could all be made up of the same material, distinguished only by the nature of the movements that drive them. The transmutation of an element would then be nothing other than the transformation of the movements which correspond to the existence of this element and which communicate its particular properties to it, in the specific movements corresponding to the existence of another element. Now, if we accept this way of seeing, we no longer perceive any necessary relation of equivalent multiplicity between the numbers which characterize the primitive movement and those which characterize the transformed movement. This conception, which I developed before the chemical society of Paris in 1863, does not resort, ultimately, to explain the existence of the chemical elements, to that of our current simple bodies and bodies of the same order,
Others want to be more specific. By a very plausible imagination, but whose contradictory character with the true atomic theory has sometimes been misunderstood, they envisage the so-called atomic particles of our elements as the complex aggregates of a more subtle matter, the ethereal fluid; aggregates made up of vortices of this fluid, a sort of spinning top, endowed with a permanent and indestructible movement. We see that the atom of chemists, the apparently most solid and most demonstrated basis of our science, has completely vanished. If we add that each of these vortices is constantly made and undone, that is to say that the very matter contained in each of the vortices remains fixed by its quantity, but not by its substance, we return completely to the ideas of Heraclitus. Therefore, in scientific philosophy today, the apparent permanence of matter tends to be replaced by the permanence of mass and energy. A single firm being would then remain, as the ultimate support of things, it is the ethereal fluid. The ethereal fluid here plays the part of the mercury of the philosophers; but it is difficult not to notice that its real existence is not better established and that it is scarcely less distant from the visible and demonstrable facts, on which our observations turn. This too is a symbol, a fiction intended to satisfy the imagination. The electric, magnetic, calorific, luminous fluids, which were accepted at the beginning of this century as supports for electricity, magnetism, heat and light, have certainly not, in the eyes of the physicists of our days, more reality than the four elements, water and earth, air and fire, invented long ago, in the time of the Ionians and in the time of Plato, to correspond to liquidity and solidity, volatility and combustion. These supposed fluids have even had a shorter existence in the history of science than the four elements: they disappeared in less than a century and they were reduced to a single one, ether, to which imaginary properties are attributed. and sometimes contradictory. But already the atom of the chemists, the ether of the physicists seem to be disappearing in their turn, as a result of new conceptions which attempt to explain everything solely by the phenomena of movement. All these theories of atoms, elements, fluids arise from an invincible inclination of the human mind towards dogmatism. Most men cannot bear to dwell in doubt and ignorance; they need to forge beliefs, absolute systems, in science as in morality. In matters where it has not succeeded in establishing laws, that is to say certain and invariable relations between phenomena, intelligence proceeds by analogies, and it turns in a circle of abstract imaginations which do not hardly vary. Certainly, I repeat, no one can affirm that the manufacture of bodies reputed to be simple is impossible a priori. But this is a question of fact and experience. If we ever succeed in forming simple bodies, in the present sense, this discovery will lead to new laws, necessary relations which we will immediately explain by new hypotheses.
END
Quote of the Day
“Wherefore, after the preparation of the matter, beware only lest by too much heat or fire, you inflame the bath, or make it too hot; secondly, take heed lest the spirit should exhale, lest it hurt the operator, to wit, lest it destroy the work, and induce many informities, as trouble, sadness, vexation, and discontent. From these things which have been spoken, this axiom is manifest, to wit, that he can never know the necessary course of nature, in the making or generating of metals, who is ignorant of the way of destroying them. You must therefore join them together that are of one consanguinity or kindred; for like natures do find out and join with their like natures, and by putrifying themselves, and mix together and mortify themselves. It is needful therefore to know this corruption and generation, and the natures themselves do embrace one another, and are brought to a fixity in a slow and gentle fire; how like natures rejoiceth with like natures; and how they retain one another and are converted into a white consistency.”
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