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.

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    each element possessed two qualities, and from this fire came to be regarded as more hot than dry, air as more wet than hot, water as more cold than wet, and earth as more dry than cold. These ideas eventually came to be applied to the seven metals —gold, silver, mercury, iron, lead, copper, and tin—which at first were regarded more as properties than substances. Thus gold, the most precious and rarest of all metals, was the most perfect substance of its colour, a property or quality supposed to be latent in all metals. There was also a belief that all metals but gold were Nature’s failures, and that by adding something to the baser metals the golden property hidden in them might be found and the design of Nature completed. The idea that matter is composed of small particles or atoms that are in a state of ceaseless motion is to be met with in Hindu and Phoenician philosophy, and was taught also by the Greeks. Anaxagoras considered every atom to be a world in miniature, and that the living body was composed of atoms derived from the elements which sustain it. According to other theories, atoms were variable not only in size, but in weight; they were impenetrable, their collision giving them an oscillatory move¬ ment which they communicated to adjacent atoms, and this movement they in their turn passed on to others more distant. Man has not yet been able to divide an atom, and the theory of the philosophers of ancient times as to the oscillatory move¬ ment of the atom was the genesis of our knowledge of the ether to-day. As the value of metals became understood and their use in the arts realized gold came to be regarded as the rarest and most precious of them all, and those who worked in them began to seek other methods of obtaining it. They asked themselves how the necessary change in other metals could be brought about. Surely, they thought, some medium could be found whereby the latent property believed to exist in these metals could be brought out, thus changing them into gold. The
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