distinguished from speculative, Alchemy at the time. It is the
Editor's desire to show that at this period there was a system of
theory based on the practical knowledge of the day.

Chemistry took its rise as a science about four hundred years before
our era. In the fragments of two of the four books of Democritus we
have probably the earliest treatise on chemical matters we are ever
likely to get hold of. Whether it is the work of Democritus or of a
much later writer is uncertain. But merely taking it as a
representative work of the early stage of chemistry, we remark that
the receipts are practicable, and some of them, little modified, are
in use to-day in goldsmith's shops. The fragments remaining to us are
on the manufacture of gold and silver, and one receipt for dyeing
purple. In this state of the science the collection of facts is the
chief point, and no purely chemical theory seems to have been formed.
Tradition, confirmed by the latest researches, associates this stage
with Egypt.

The second stage in the history of Chemistry--the birth of Alchemy in
the Western World--occurred when the Egyptian practical receipts, the
neo-Greek philosophies, and the Chinese dreams of an "elixir vitae"
were fused into one by the Arab and Syriac writers. Its period of
activity ranges from the seventh to the tenth centuries. Little is
really known about it, or can be, until the Arabic texts, which are
abundant in Europe, are translated and classified both from the
scholar's and the chemist's standpoint. Many works were translated
into Latin about the end of the tenth century, such as the spurious
fourth book of the _Meteorics of Aristotle_, the treatises of the
_Turta Philosophorum_, _Artis Auriferae_, etc., which formed
the starting-point of European speculation. The theoretical chemistry