Today, while looking through one of my many piles of papers, I found an article I had copied some years ago and entirely fogotten. It is a good summary of the laboratory equipment and processes used by 18th century chemists in France and Britain. It shows, in considerable detail, the inheritance that the emerging chemistry had from alchemy. A long appendix of some 25 pages provides a list of British eighteenth-century chemical terms, and we find here many of the substances familiar in alchemy. The article was published by the Smithsonian and should be easily available in any good academic institution library. I consider it to be an invaluable reference work, which sadly I had mislaid for many years.
Ekland, Jon. The Incompleat Chymist, being an essay on the Eighteenth-century chemist in his laboratory, with a dictionary of obsolete chemical terms of the period. Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology, Number 33. Washington, 1975.
http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/webdocs/Chem-History/Obsolete-Chem-TermsTOC.html
Last edited on Wed Feb 13th, 2008 12:11 pm by alchemyd
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