Copy 1, Volume 1

The history of chemistry / By Thomas Thomson.

  • Thomas Thomson
Date:
1830-1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of chemistry / By Thomas Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/372 page 6
    of evil, and things which could not be advantageous to their souls. The Scriptures inform us that the giants sprang from these embraces. Chema is the first of their traditions respecting these arts. The book itself they called Chema; hence the art is called Chemia.” Zosimus is not the only Greek writer on Chemistry. Olaus Borrichius has given us a list of thirty-eight treatises, which he says exist in the libraries of Rome, Venice, and Paris: and Dr. Shaw has increased this list to eighty-nine.* But among these we find the names of Hermes, Isis, Horus, Democritus, Cleopatra, Porphyry, Plato, &c.—names which undoubtedly have been affixed to the writings of comparatively modern and obscure authors. The style of these authors, as Borrichius informs us, is barbarous. They are chiefly the production of ecclesiastics, who lived between the fifth and twelfth centuries. In these tracts, the art of which they treat is sometimes called chemistry (xnpeca); sometimes the chemical urt (xnpevruca) 5 sometimes the holy art ; and the philosopher’s stone. It is evident from this, that between the fifth cen- tury and the taking of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, the Greeks believed in the possibility of making gold and silver artificially; and that the art which professed to teach these processes was called by them Chemistry. These opinions passed from the Greeks to the Ara- bians, when, under the califs of the family of Abas- sides, they began to turn their attention to science, about the beginning of the ninth century; and when the enlightened zeal of the Fatimites in Africa, and the Ommiades in Spain, encouraged the cultivation of the sciences. From Spain they gradually made their way into the different Christian kingdoms of Eu- rope. From the eleventh to the sixteenth century, the art ha Shaw’s Translation of Boerhaave’s Chemistry, i, 20,
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3