The lure and romance of alchemy / by C.J.S. Thompson.

  • Charles Thompson
Date:
[1932]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The lure and romance of alchemy / by C.J.S. Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    131/300 page 109
    learn from the Mappce Clavicula, in which the recipe for “Mak¬ ing of Gold ” begins, “Prayer you are to recite during the opera¬ tion or the fusion that follows, in order that the gold may be formed.” The idea of prayer doubtless arose from the in¬ vocations to deities that came down from the times of the Egyptians, which in the Middle Ages came to be merged into Christian prac¬ tices. But the alchemist’s sur¬ roundings could not have been always the picturesque interiors which artists loved to represent, for, according to descriptions of labora¬ tories that have been left by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were usually arranged with workmanlike precision. The various types of ap¬ paratus that have come down to us from the days of the alchemists form an interesting study. Some of them led to important discoveries in times gone by and are now almost forgotten, while others still survive in our laboratories and have changed but little in shape throughout the centuries. The earliest known representation of a piece of apparatus used in alchemy appears in the Greek manuscript of a treatise attributed to Synesius and said to have been written in the fourth century. It is the drawing of a crude still, the body of which is formed by a large cucurbit, a bulbous-shaped vessel round at the bottom with a short, wide neck, surmounted by a caput, or head, from which a tube runs into a receiver. Several of the early manuscripts on alchemy contain drawings 109 PLAN AND ELEVATION OF A LABORATORY Libavius, 1606
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