Volume 1

History of chemistry, / by Sir Edward Thorpe.

  • Thomas Edward Thorpe
Date:
1909-10
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of chemistry, / by Sir Edward Thorpe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    into the nature of chemical change, and to learn the causes and conditions of its action. Although we have cited the ancient Egyptians as practising the chemical arts, there is no proof that these arts actually originated with them. China, India, Chaldaea have each in turn been regarded as the birth¬ place of the various technical processes from which chemistry may be said to have taken its rise. Neverthe¬ less, it is mainly from Egyptian records, or from writings avowedly based on information from Egyptian sources, that such knowledge as we possess of the earliest chemical processes is derived. It is significant that the word “ chemistry ” has its origin in chemi, “ the black land,” the ancient name for Egypt. The art itself was constantly spoken of as the “ Egyptian art.” “The word chemistry,” says Boerhaave, in the Pro¬ legomena of his New Method of Chemistry (Shaw and Chambers’s translation, London, 1727), in Greek should be wrote x77/ata? and in Lathi and English chemia and chemistry ; not as usual, chymia and chymistry. The first author in whom the word is found is Plutarch, who lived under the Emperors Domitian, Netva, and Trajan. That philosopher, in his treatise of Isis and Osiris, takes occasion to observe that Egypt, in the sacred dialect of the country, was called by the same name as the black of the eye—-viz., xrllULa—by which he seems to intimate that the word chemia in the Egyptian language signified black, and that the country, Egypt, might take its denomination from the blackness of the soil. But [continues Boerhaave] the etymology and gram¬ matical signification of the name is not so easily dis¬ patched. The critics and antiquaries, among whom it has been a great subject of inquiry, will not let it pass without some further disquisition. Instead of black, some will have it originally denote secret, or occult; and