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Chemistry for beginners

Chapter 5: ALCHEMY
By Hereward Carrington
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Science - Chemistry/Biochemistry

About This Book

A concise introduction traces chemistry's development from ancient Greek and alchemical ideas through medieval practice to modern atomic theory and the periodic law. It explains elements, atomic weights, valency, analysis and synthesis, and differentiates organic and inorganic chemistry, including catalysis, enzymes, and hormones. Practical topics include spectroscopic methods, industrial chemistry, instruments, and ocean salinity. Later chapters address radioactivity, intra-atomic energy, electrons, astrophysical applications, and discussions on the origin of life and the philosophical implications connecting chemical theory with metaphysical questions.

ALCHEMY

The modern science of chemistry is relatively new. It gradually emerged from alchemy, which practically constituted the chemistry of the middle ages. The objects of alchemy were various: (1) the transmutation of the base metals into gold, by means of the so-called “Philosopher’s Stone”; (2) The fixation of Mercury; (3) The discovery of the elixir of Life, etc. These were the purely chemical aspects of alchemy, but we now know that the alchemists had much more than this in mind, in their experimental work, and that they hinted at their true meaning in many of their veiled writings. Many of the higher types of alchemists were also mystics, and when they wrote in chemical symbols, they really concealed their inner meaning; they referred, very largely, to the inner spirit of man, and the methods by which this could be changed or transformed into some higher spiritual being. (See “Alchemy Ancient and Modern,” by H. Stanley Redgrove; “Alchemy, Its Scope and Romance,” by the Rev. J. E. Mercer, etc.) Mr. Foster Damon has lately published a series of articles in which he has brought forward a mass of evidence tending to prove that the alchemists were also deep students of psychic phenomena, and that their experiments relative to the “First Matter” were really experiments in so-called “Materialization!” He has published his findings in a series of articles in the “Occult Review.”