of the changes of material things, they had thought about these
changes, regarded them as revelations of spiritual truths, built on
them theories of things in heaven and earth (and a good many things in
neither), and used them in manufactures, arts, and handicrafts,
especially in one very curious manufacture wherein not the thousandth
fragment of a grain of the finished article was ever produced.

The accurate and systematic study of the changes which material things
undergo is called chemistry; we may, perhaps, describe alchemy as the
superficial, and what may be called subjective, examination of these
changes, and the speculative systems, and imaginary arts and
manufactures, founded on that examination.

We are assured by many old writers that Adam was the first alchemist,
and we are told by one of the initiated that Adam was created on the
sixth day, being the 15th of March, of the first year of the world;
certainly alchemy had a long life, for chemistry did not begin until
about the middle of the 18th century.

No branch of science has had so long a period of incubation as
chemistry. There must be some extraordinary difficulty in the way of
disentangling the steps of those changes wherein substances of one
kind are produced from substances totally unlike them. To inquire how
those of acute intellects and much learning regarded such occurrences
in the times when man's outlook on the world was very different from
what it is now, ought to be interesting, and the results of that
inquiry must surely be instructive.

If the reader turns to a modern book on chemistry (for instance, _The
Story of the Chemical Elements_, in this series), he will find, at