by the examination of the objects that have come down to us. The earliest precise and detailed texts describing their processes are contained in an Egyptian papyrus found at Thebes, and now in the museum at Leyden.
This papyrus is in the Greek language and dates from the third century of the Christian era. In my translation of it, comparing parts of it with phrases in the works of Pliny and Vitruvius on the same subjects and with Greek alchemistic works of the fourth and fifth centuries, I have reconstituted a whole science, ancient alchemy, till now misunderstood and uncomprehended, because it was founded on a mixture of real facts, profound views on the unity of matter, and chimerical religious fancies. These practices and theories had a still larger bearing than the working of metals. The industries of the precious metals were in fact associated at that epoch with those of the dyeing of cloths, the coloring of glasses, and the imitation of precious stones, all guided by the same tinctorial ideas and executed by the same operators.
Thus alchemy and the chimerical hope of making gold were derived from the goldsmiths' artifices for coloring metals. The pretended processes of transmutation which were current during the middle ages were in their origin only tricks for preparing alloys of inferior standard—that is, for imitating and falsifying the precious metals. But, by an almost invincible attraction, the operators addicted to these practices did not hesitate to imagine that one could pass from the imitation of gold to its effective formation—especially if he had the aid of the supernatural powers, invoked by magical formulas.
At any rate, it was not known till now how these practices and theories passed from Egypt, where they were flourishing toward the end of the Roman Empire, into the West, where we find them in full development from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the writings of the Latin alchemists and in the laboratories of the goldsmiths, dyers, and makers of colored glass. Their renascence was generally attributed to translations of Arabian works made at that epoch. But, without assuming to deny the part played by the Arabian books in the renascence of the arts and sciences in the West, in the period of the Crusades, it is no less certain that a continuous tradition subsisted in the professional recollections of the arts and trades from the Roman Empire till the Carlovingian period, and later a tradition of chemical manipulations and scientific and mystical ideas. In fact, in pursuing my studies of the history of science, I have met, in the examination of the Latin works of the middle ages, certain technical manuals which were related most directly with the metallurgical treatises of the Greco-Egyptian alchemists and goldsmiths. I purpose to
