The sceptical chymist / by the Hon. Robert Boyle.

  • Boyle, Robert, 1627-1691.
Date:
[between 1900 and 1999]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The sceptical chymist / by the Hon. Robert Boyle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    108/264 (page 80)
    and partly by my own thoughts, be supplied with more, than ’twere at present proper tor me to insist largely on. And therefore I shall mention only, and that briefly, three or four. Of these, I shall take the first from the state of the controversie itself, and the genuine notion of mistion,. which though much intricated by the schoolmen, I take in short to be this. Aristotle, at least as many of his interpreters expound him, and as indeed he teaches in some places, where he professedly dissents from the antients, declares mistion to be such a mutual penetration, and perfect union of the mingled elements, that there is no portion of the mixt body, how minute soever, which does not contain all, and every of the four elements, or in which, if you please, all the elements are not. And I remember, that he reprehends the mistion taught by the ancients, as too slight or gross, for this reason, that bodies mixt according to their hypothesis, though they appear to humane eyes, would not appear such to the acute eyes of a lynx, whose perfecter sight would disceme the elements, if they were no otherwise mingled, than as his predecessors would have it, to be but blended, not united; whereas the antients, though they did not all agree about what kind of bodies were mixt, yet they did almost unanimously hold, that in a compounded bodie, though the miscibilia, whether elements, principles, or whatever they pleased to call them, were associated in such small parts, and with so much exactness, that there was no sensible part of the mass but seemed to be of the same nature with the rest, and with the whole; yet as to the atomes, or other insensible parcels of matter, whereof each of the miscibilia consisted, they retained each of them its own nature, being but by apposition or juxta- position united with the rest into one bodie. So that although by vertue of this composition the mixt body did perhaps obtain divers new qualities, yet still the ingredients that compounded it, retaining their own nature, were by the destruction of the compositum separable from each other, the minute parts disingaged from those of a differing nature, and associated with those of their own sort returning to be again, fire, earth.