ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL CHEMISTRY. iii 



date, even were it only the date of tlieir copies. This source of 

 facts is already known as to antiquity. It is not wanting as to the 

 middle ages, although it seems to have till now escaped the eru- 

 dite persons who have written the history of science, and it per- 

 mits us to reconstitute that under a new form and with a new 

 precision. By the aid of those documents I shall attempt to show, 

 concerning myself especially with chemical industries, what 

 knowledge, practical or theoretical, subsisted after the fall of 

 ancient civilization, and how the traditions of the shop main- 

 tained those industries, almost without new inventions, but at 

 least at a certain level of perfection. 



The history of physical science in antiquity is very imperfectly 

 known to us. There existed then no methodical treatise for the 

 purpose of teaching, such as we have in the principal civilized 

 states. Hence, except as to the medical sciences, we have only 

 insufficient notions respecting the processes employed in the arts 

 and trades of the ancients. The experimental method of the mod- 

 erns has associated those practices into a body of doctrines, and 

 has shown close relations between them and the theories for which 

 they served as basis and confirmation. This method was almost 

 unknown to the ancients, at best as a general principle of scien- 

 tific learning. Their industries had little connection with theories, 

 excepting in measures of length, surface, or volume, which were 

 deduced immediately from geometry and in goldsmiths' receipts, 

 which were the origin of the theories, partly real and partly im- 

 aginary, of alchemy. It has been even asked if industrial formu- 

 las were not formerly preserved by purely oral tradition and care- 

 fully held back for the initiated. Some scraps of the traditional 

 lore may have been transcribed into the notes which have been 

 used in the composition of Pliny's Natural History and the works 

 of Vitruvius and Isidore de Seville, not without a considerable 

 mixture of fables and errors. But a more thorough examination 

 of the works that have come down to us from antiquity, a more 

 attentive study of the manuscripts, at first neglected because they 

 did not relate to literary or theological studies or to ordinary his- 

 torical questions, permits the affirmation that they were not so. 

 We are all the time discovering new and considerable documents 

 which show that the processes of the ancient industrials were then, 

 as now, inscribed in workmen's note-books or manuals intended 

 for the use of the tradespeople, and that they were transmitted 

 from hand to hand from the most remote times of ancient Egypt 

 and Alexandrine Egypt, to those of the Roman Empire and the 

 middle ages. The discovery of these note-books offers all the more 

 interest because the use of the precious metals with civilized peo- 

 ples goes back to the highest antiquity ; the technique of the ancient 

 goldsmiths and jewelers is not revealed to us all at once except 



