ANCIENT AND MEDIJEVAL CHEMISTRY. 115 



because they point to the beginning of chemistry by moist pro- 

 cesses. They figured in Pliny and the ancient authors, to the 

 same purposes. The liquids are always natural ones or the re- 

 sults of the mixture of such, before or after spontaneous com- 

 bustion. There is no mention of the active liquids obtained by 

 distillation, which were called divine or sulphurous waters, and 

 held an important place with the Greco-Egyptian chemists, and 

 became the origin of our acids, alkalies, and other agents ; they 

 had not yet entered into industrial use, and are seldom met with 

 previous to the fourteenth century. 



The group of receij^ts transmitted by the formulas for dye- 

 ing, passed into a more extended collection called the Key to 

 Painting, of which exist a manuscrip : of the tenth century in the 

 library of Schlestadt and one of the twelfth century, of which 

 an edition was published in 1847 by Mr. Way. The former 

 manusci-ipt is free from all Arabian influence, which has caused 

 the interpolation of five additional articles in the second one. 

 The work contains a treatise on the precious metals comprising 

 now a hundred articles, about half of the original work, the other 

 half having been lost, and a treatise on recipes for dyeing, repre- 

 senting principally those in the Formulas ; together with sixteen 

 articles on military ballistics and fireworks, forming a special 

 group ; articles on the hydrostatic balance and the densities of 

 the metals ; and industrial and magic recipes, added at the end of 

 the book. The treatise on the precious metals is of great inter- 

 est because of the striking analogies it presents with the Ley- 

 den Egyptian papyrus found at Thebes, and with other ancient 

 works. Many of the recipes are literally translated from these 

 ancient works ; an identity proviug indisputably the continuous 

 preservation of alchemic practices, including transmutation, from 

 Egypt down to the artisans of the Latin West. The theories 

 proper, on the other hand, did not reappear in the West till to- 

 ward the end of the twelfth century, after they had passed 

 through the Syrians and the Arabs. But the knowledge of the 

 processes themselves was never lost. This fact is demonstrated 

 by the study of the alloys intended to imitate and falsify gold ; 

 for coloring (copper) gold-color ; for fabricating gold ; for making 

 test gold; for rendering gold heavier; and for doubling gold. 

 The recipes are filled with Greek words that betray their origin. 



The object for the most part is simply to make base gold, as, 

 for instance, by preparing an alloy of gold and silver, colored 

 with copper. The goldsmith, however, tried to make this pass 

 for pure gold. Then manufactures of complex alloys which were 

 made to pass for pure gold were made easier by the intervention 

 of mercury and sulphurets of arsenic, the use of which goes back 

 to the earliest times of the Roman Empire. Thus Pliny relates 



