ALCHEMY

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within in the individualities of the various metals, that in
it their various substances were incorporated. This black powder was mystically identified with the underworld form
of the god Osiris, and consequently was credited with magical properties. Thus there grew up in Egypt the belief
that magical powers existed in fluxes and alloys. Probably such a belief existed throughout Europe in connection
with the bronze-working castes of its several races. Its was probably in the Byzantium of the fourth century,
however, that alchemical science received embryonic form. There is little doubt that Egyptian tradition, filtering
through Alexandrian Hellenic sources was the foundation upon which the infant science was built, and this is borne
out by the circumstance that the art was attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and supposed to be contained in its
entirety in his works.

The Arabs, after their conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, carried on the researches of the ...

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the seventh and the seventeenth
centuries, the heyday of alchemy, in the theory and practice of the art. The same sentiments and processes are
found expressed in the later alchemical authorities as in the earliest, and a wonderful unanimity as regards the
basic canons of the great art is evinced by the hermetic students of the time. On the introduction of chemistry as
a practical art, alchemical science fell into desuetude and disrepute, owing chiefly to the number of charlatans
practicing it, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century, as a school, it may be said to have become defunct.
Here and there, however, a solitary student of the art lingered, and in the department ...

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