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Modern chemistry has its roots in a practice far too readily dismissed

THE historian Herbert Butterfield once dismissed writers on alchemy as being 鈥渢inctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe鈥�. There is no danger of that slur being cast at Lawrence Principe for his new book, The Secrets of Alchemy.

A historian of science and practising chemist, Principe provides a dazzling account of how scholarly opinion on the relationship between alchemy and chemistry has transformed in the last four decades. In the process he brings chemical knowledge and historical detective work to a subject that has too readily been dismissed as fraudulent nonsense.

The first part of his book takes us swiftly from the origins of alchemy among Graeco-Egyptian artisans, its further development among the Arabs, and then its flowering in medieval Europe as practitioners sought to prepare elixirs and medicinal compounds.

Principe then jumps to a fascinating explanation of alchemy鈥檚 decline and rejection during the 18th-century Enlightenment. It was only at this point, at the pinnacle of a chemical revolution linked to the French nobleman and chemist Antoine Lavoisier, that alchemy took on the restricted meaning of turning base metals into gold; before then, alchemy and chemistry had been virtually interchangeable.

To avoid this misconception, Principe refers to chemistry prior to Lavoisier as 鈥渃hymistry鈥�, underlining the fact that while its practitioners held a worldview quite different from those of modern chemists, their practical activities are not so different from those used today. He argues that the reinterpretation of alchemy as a metaphor for spiritual transmutation, by 19th and 20th-century occultists including Carl Jung, was both erroneous and unfortunate. It was this faulty reading of alchemy, Principe contends, that led uncritical historians to deny any historical continuity between chymistry and modern chemistry.

Finally, he returns to the pre-Enlightenment era, when gold-making was but one of the many activities of practical chymists. In the two striking final chapters he shows how obscure alchemical texts 鈥� with their extraordinary illustrations and multiple hidden names for common substances 鈥� can be read like cryptic puzzles.

By reproducing alchemical recipes in a modern laboratory, Principe reveals the accurate accounts of physical and chemical changes they contain. His book includes coloured plates of his intriguing results. For example, he demonstrates that well-known chymical practitioners such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton understood the rule of conservation of mass and framed their findings in terms of matter having a particulate structure.

The book wears its scholarship lightly and is a pleasure to read. Its fundamental message is that, although transmutation of base metals into gold was fanciful, alchemists鈥� accounts of the real chemical changes they witnessed were far from imaginary.