The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy

Beginning in China in the search for the secret of immortality, and appearing independently in Egypt as an attempt to produce gold through the arts of smelting and alloying metals, alchemy received a great boost in Europe from studies by Islamic and Jewish alchemists. Translated into Latin and then combined with what was known of Greek natural science these accounts provoked an outburst of attempts to manipulate matter and to change it into transformative substances known as the Philosopher...