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.

    162/264 (page 134)
    such as the chymists would have them pass for, upon the account of their having some affinity with them; consider a little with me, that in regard an element or principle ought to be perfectly similar and homogeneous, there is no just cause why I should rather give the body proposed the name of this or that element or principle, because it has a resemblance to it in some obvious quality, rather than deny it that name upon the account of divers other qualities, wherein the proposed bodies are unlike; and if you do but consider what slight and easily producible qualities they are that suffice, as I have already more than once observed, to denominate a chymical principle or an element, you’l not, I hope, think my wariness to be destitute either of example, or else of reason. For we see that the chymists will not allow the Aristotelians that the salt in ashes ought to be called earth, though the saline and terrestrial part symbolize in weight, in dryness, in fixness and fusibility, only because the one is sapid and dissoluble in water, and the other not: besides, we see that sapidness and volatility are wont to denominate the chymists mercury or spirit; and yet how many bodies, think you, may agree in those qualities which may yet be of very differing natures, and disagree in qualities either more numerous, or more considerable, or both. For not only spirit of nitre, aqua fortis, spirit of salt, spirit of oyle of vitriol, spirit of allume, spirit of vinegar, and all saline liquors distilled from animal bodies, but all the acetous spirits of woods freed from their vinegar; all these, I say, and many others must belong to the chymists mercury, though it appear not why some of them should more be comprehended under one denomination than the chymists sulphur, or oyle should likewise be; for their distilled oyles are also fluid, volatile, and tastable, as well as their mercury; nor is it necessary, that their sulphur should be unctuous or dissoluble in water, since they generally referr spirit of wine to sulphurs, although that spirit be not unctuous, and will freely mingle with water. So that bare inflamability must constitute the essence of the chymists sulphur; as uninflamableness joyned with any taste is .enough to intitle a distilled liquor to be