Читать книгу The Fontana History of Chemistry - William Brock J. - Страница 11

Greeks alchemy spread geographically with Christianity and so passed to the Arabs, who were also party to the ideas and practices of Indian and Chinese technologists and alchemists. The story that alchemical texts were burned and alchemists expelled from Egypt by the decree of the Emperor Diocletian in 292 AD appears to be legendary. Alchemy does not seem to have reached the Latin west until the eleventh century, when the first translations from the Arabic began to appear. In Arabic alchemy (the word itself is, of course, Arabic), we meet for the first time the notion of the philosopher’s stone and potable gold or the elixir of life. Both these ideas are found in Chinese alchemy. Two alchemists who were much revered later in the Latin west were Jābir and Rhazes.

Over two thousand writings covering the fields of alchemy, astrology, numerology, medicine and mysticism were attributed to Jābir ibn Hayyān, a shadowy eighth-century figure. In 1942, the German scholar Paul Kraus showed that the entire Arabic Jābirian corpus was the compilation of a Muslim tenth-century religious sect, the Ism’iliya, or Brethren of Purity. No doubt, like Hippocrates, there was a historical Jābir, but the writings that survive and which formed the basis for the Latin writings attributed to Geber were written only in the tenth century. Until very recently, no Arabic originals for the Latin Geber were known and many historians suspected that they were western forgeries, or rather original compilations that exploited the name of the famous Arabic alchemist. William Newman has shown, however, that the Geberian Summa Perfectionis, arguably the most influential of Latin works on alchemy, was definitely based upon manuscripts of Jābirian translations already in circulation, and that it was the work of one Paulus de Tarento, of whom nothing is yet known.

The Jābirian corpus as well as the Latin Summa were important for introducing the sulphur – mercury theory of metallic composition. According to this idea, based upon Aristotle’s explanation in Meteorologica, metals were generated inside the earth by the admixture of a fiery, smoky principle, sulphur, to a watery principle, mercury. This also seems to have been a conflation with Stoic alchemical ideas that metals were held together by a spirit (mercury) and a soul (sulphur). The theory was to lend itself beautifully to symbolic interpretation as a chemical wedding and to lead to vivid conjugal images in later alchemical texts and illustrations. As critics in the Latin west like Albertus Magnus were to point out later, this did not explain satisfactorily how the substantial forms of different metals and minerals were produced. What is most interesting, therefore, is that the Summa clearly speaks of a particulate or corpuscular theory based upon Aristotle’s concession, despite his objection to atomism, that there were minima naturalia, or ‘molecules’ as we would say, which limit the analysis of all substances. The exhalation of the smaller particles of sulphur and mercury inside the earth led to a thickening and mixing together until a solid homogeneity resulted. Metals varied in weight (density or specific gravity) and form because of the differing degrees of packing of their constituent particles – implying that lighter metals had larger particles separated by larger spaces. Since the particles of noble metals such as gold were closely packed, the alchemists’ task, according to the author of the Summa, was to reduce the constituent particles of lighter, baser metals in size and to pack them closer together. Hence the emphasis upon the sublimation of mercury and its fixation in the practical procedures described by Geber. As in the original Jābirian writings, such changes to the density, malleability and colour of metals were ascribed to mercurial agents that were referred to as ‘medicines’, ‘elixirs’ or ‘tinctures’. Although these terms were also adopted in the west, it became even more common to refer to the agent as the ‘philosopher’s stone’ (lapidens philosophorum). References to a stone as the key to transmutation in fact go back to Greek alchemy and have been found in a Cairo manuscript attributed to Agathodaimon, as well as in the earliest known alchemical encyclopedia, the Cheirokmeta attributed to Zosimos (c. 300 AD).

Apart from its influence on alchemical practice, the Summa also contained an important defence of alchemy and, with it, of all forms of technology. Alchemy had always been too practical an art to be included in the curriculum of the medieval university; moreover, it had seemed theologically suspect insofar as it offered sinful humankind the divine power of creation. The Summa author, however, argued that people had the ability to improve on Nature because that was part of their nature and cited, among other things, farmers’ exploitation of grafting and alchemists’ ability to replicate (synthesize) certain chemicals found naturally. As Newman has suggested⁴:

During this innovative period, alchemical writers and their allies produced a literary corpus which was among the earliest in Latin to actively promote the doctrine that art can equal or outdo the products of nature, and that man can even change the order of the natural world by altering the species of those products. This technological dream, however premature, was to have a lasting effect on the direction taken by Western culture.

Exoteric alchemy, committed as it was to laboratory manipulation, in this way bequeathed a commitment to empiricism in science and emphasized the centrality of experiment.

Al-Razi (850–c. 923), or Rhazes, was a Persian physician and alchemist who practised in Baghdad and who compiled the extremely practical text, Secret of Secrets, which, despite its esoteric title and hint of great promises, was a straightforward manual of chemical practice. Rhazes classified substances into metals, vitriols, boraxes, salts and stones on the grounds of solubilities and tastes, and added sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), prepared by distilling hair with salt and urine, to the alchemists’ repertory of substances. Sal ammoniac was soon found to be most useful in ‘colouring’ metals and in dissolving them.

A rationalist and systematist, Rhazes seems to have been among the first to have codified laboratory procedures into techniques of purification, separation, mixing and removal of water, or solidification. But although he and other Arabic authorities referred to ‘sharp waters’ obtained in the distillation of mixtures of vitriol, alum, salt, saltpetre and sal ammoniac, it is doubtful whether these were any more than acid salt solutions. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly by following the procedures laid down by Rhazes and by modifying still-heads that Europeans first prepared pure sulphuric, hydrochloric and nitric acids in the thirteenth century.

The Secret of Secrets was divided into sections on substances – a huge list and description of chemicals and minerals – apparatus and recipes. Among the apparatus described and used were beakers, flasks, phials, basins, crystallization dishes and glass vessels, jugs and casseroles, candle and naphtha lamps, braziers, furnaces (athanors), files, spatulas, hammers, ladles, shears, tongs, sand and water baths, hair and linen filters, alembics (stills), aludels, funnels, cucurbits (flasks), and pestles and mortars – indeed, the basic apparatus that was to be found in alchemical, pharmaceutical and metallurgical workshops until the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Rhazes’ techniques of distillation, sublimation, calcination and solution were to be the basis for chemical manipulation and chemical engineering from then onwards. We must be careful, however, not to take later European artists’ representations of alchemical workshops at face value.

A few of the techniques described by Rhazes deserve further comment. Calcination originally meant the reduction of any solid to the state of a fine powder, and often involved a change of composition brought about by means of strong heat from a furnace. Only later, say by the eighteenth century, did it come to mean specifically the reduction of a metal to its calx or oxide. There were many different kinds of furnace available and they varied in size according to the task in hand. Charcoal, wood and straw were used (coal was frowned upon because of the unpleasant fumes it produced). The temperature was raised blacksmith-fashion by means of bellows – hence the derogatory names of ‘puffers’ or ‘workers by fire’ that were applied to alchemists. Direct heat was often avoided in delicate reactions by the use of sand, dung or water baths, the latter (the bain-marie) being attributed to the third-century BC woman chemist known as Mary the Jewess. Needless to say, because heating was difficult to control, apparatus broke frequently. Even in the eighteenth century when Lavoisier found need to distil water continuously for a period of months, his tests were continually frustrated by breakages. By the same token, since temperature conditions would have been hard to control and replicate, the repetition of processes under identical conditions was difficult or impossible. However, whether alchemists were aware of this is doubtful.

Distillation, one of the most important procedures in practical chemistry, gave rise to a diversity of apparatus, all of which are the ancestors of today’s oil refineries. Already in 3000 BC there is archaeological evidence of extraction pots being used in the Mesopotamian region. These pots were used by herbalists and perfume makers. A double-rim trough was percolated with holes, the trough itself being filled with perfume-making flowers and herbs in water. When fired, the steam condensed in the lid and percolated back onto the plants below. In a variation of this, no holes were drilled and the distillate was collected directly in the trough around the rim, from where it was probably removed from time to time by means of a dry cloth. In the Mongolian or Chinese still, the distillate fell from a concave roof into a central catch-bowl from which a side-tube led to the outside. Modern experiments, using working glass models of these stills, have shown that⁵:

the preparation of strong spiritous liquor was, from a technological point of view, a rather simple matter and no civilisation had a distillation apparatus which gave it an advantage.

Even so, although the Chinese probably had distilled alcohol from wine by the fourth century AD, it was several centuries later before it was known in the west. Even earlier, in the second century of our era, the Chinese had discovered how to concentrate alcohol by a freezing process, whereby separation was achieved by freezing water and leaving concentrated alcohol behind.

The observation of distillation also provided a solution to the theoretical problem of what made solid materials cohere. The binding material could not be Aristotelian water since this patently could not be extracted from a heated stone. Distillation of other materials showed, however, that an ‘oily’ distillate commonly succeeded the ‘aqueous’ fraction that first boiled off at a lower temperature. It could be argued, therefore, that an ‘unctuous’, or fatty, moisture was the cohesive binder of solid bodies. This notion that ‘earths’ contained a fatty material was still to be found in Stahl’s theory of phlogiston in the eighteenth century.

An improvement on distillation techniques was apparently first made by Alexandrian alchemists in the first century AD – though, in the absence of recorded evidence, it is just as likely that these alchemists were merely adopting techniques and apparatus from craftsmen and pharmacists. This is particularly evident in the ‘kerotakis’, which took its name from the palette used by painters and artists. This wedge-shaped palette was fitted into an ambix (still-head) as a shelf to contain a substance that was to be reacted with a boiling liquid, which would condense, drip or sublime onto it. These alchemists made air cooling in the distillation process more efficient by separating the distillate off by a continuous process and raising the ambix well above the bikos or cucurbit vessel embedded in the furnace or sand bath. (In 1937 the word Ambix was adopted by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Early Chemistry as the title of the journal that ever since has played an important role in the history of chemistry.) In the Latin west the word alembic (from the Arabic form of ambix, ‘al-anbiq’) came to denote the complete distillation apparatus. By its means, rose waters, other perfumes and, most importantly, mineral acids and alcohol began to be prepared and explored in the thirteenth century.

Continuous distillations were also made possible in the ‘pelican’, so-called because of its arms, which bore resemblance to that bird’s wings. Such distillations were believed to be significant by alchemists, who were much influenced by Jābir’s reputed success at ‘projection’ (the preparation of gold) after 700 distillations. The more efficient cooling of a distillate outside the still-head appears to have been a European contribution developed in the twelfth century. Alchemists and technologists referred to these as water-cooled stills or ‘serpents’. This more efficient cooling of the distillate probably had something to do with the preparation of alcohol in the twelfth century, some centuries after the Chinese. This became an important solvent as well as beverage in pharmacy. By then chemical apparatus was becoming commonly made of glass. It should be noted that, although ‘alcohol’ is an Arabic word, it had first meant antimony sulphide, ‘kohl’. In the Latin west, alcohol was initially called ‘aqua vitae’ or ‘aqua ardens’ (the water that burns), and only in the sixteenth century was it renamed alcohol. It had also been named the ‘quintessence’, or fifth essence, by the fourteenth-century Spanish Franciscan preacher, John of Rupescissa, in an influential tract, De consideratione quintae essentiae. According to John, alcohol, the product of the distillation of wines, possessed great healing powers from the fact that it was the essence of the heavens. An even more powerful medicine was obtained when the sun, gold, was dissolved in it to produce ‘potable gold’. John’s advocation of the quintessence was extremely important since it encouraged pharmacists to try and extract other quintessences from herbs and minerals, and thus to usher in the age of iatrochemistry in the sixteenth century. Here was the parting of the ways of alchemy and chemistry.

The sixteenth century saw great improvements in chemical technology and the appearance of several printed books dealing with the subject. Such treatises mentioned very little chemical theory. They aimed not to advance knowledge, but to record a technological complex that, in Multhauf’s opinion, ‘although sophisticated, had been virtually static throughout the Christian era’. Generally speaking they discussed only apparatus and reagents, and provided recipes that used distillation methods. Many recipes, especially those for artists’ pigments and dyes, bear an astonishing resemblance to those found in the aurifictive papyri of the third century and therefore imply continuity in craftsmen’s recipes for making imitation jewellery, textile dyeing, inks, paints and cheap, but impressive, chemical ‘tricks’.

One such book was the Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480–1538), which was published in Italy in 1540. This gave a detailed survey of contemporary metallurgy, the manufacture of weapons and the use of water-power-driven machinery. For the first time there was an explicit stress upon the value of assaying as a guide to the scaling up of operations and the regular reporting of quantitative measurements in the various recipes. On alchemy, despite retaining the traditional view that metals grew inside the earth, Biringuccio provides a sceptical view based upon personal observation and experience⁶:

Now in having spoken and in speaking thus I have no thought of wishing to detract from or decrease the virtues of this art, if it has any, but I have only given my opinion, based on the facts of the matter. I could still discourse concerning the art of transmutation, or alchemy as it is called, yet neither through my own efforts nor those of others (although I have sought with great diligence) have I ever had the fortune to see anything worthy of being approved by good men, or that it was not necessary to abandon as imperfect for one cause or another even before it was half finished. For this reason I surely deserve to be excused, all the more because I know that I am drawn by more powerful reasons, or, perhaps by natural inclination, to follow the path of mining more willingly than alchemy, even though mining is a harder task, both physical and mental, is more expensive, and promises less at first sight and in words than does alchemy; and it has as its scope the observation of Nature’s powers rather than those of art – or indeed of seeing what really exists rather than what one thinks exists.

That is succinctly put: by the sixteenth century, the natural ores of metals, and their separations and transformations by heat, acids and distillations, had become more interesting and financially fruitful than time spent fruitlessly on speculative transmutations.

Alchemy had been transmuted into chemistry, as the change of name reflected. Here a digression into the origins of the word ‘chemistry’ seems appropriate. There is, in fact, no scholarly consensus over the origins of the Greek word ‘chemeia’ or ‘chymia’. One familiar suggestion has been a derivation of the Coptic word ‘Khem’, meaning the black land (Egypt), and etymological transfer to the blackening processes in dyeing, metallurgy and pharmacy. What is certain is that philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle had no word for chemistry, for the term ‘chymia’, meaning to fuse or cast a metal, dates only from about 300 AD. A Chinese origin from the word ‘Kim-Iya’, meaning ‘gold-making juice’, has not been authenticated, though Needham has plausibly suggested that the root ‘chem’ may be equivalent to the Chinese ‘chin’, as in the phrase for the art of transmutation, lien chin shu. The Cantonese pronunciation of this phrase would be, roughly, lin kem shut, i.e. with a hard ‘k’ sound. Needham concludes that we have the possibility that ‘the name for the Chinese “gold art”, crystallised in the syllable chin (kiem) spread over the length and breadth of the Old World, evoking first the Greek terms for chemistry and then, indirectly, the Arabic one’.

Whatever the etymology, the Latin and English words alchemia, alchemy and chemistry were derived from the Arabic name of the art, ‘al Kimiya’ or ‘alkymia’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Arabic definite article, ‘al’, was dropped in the sixteenth century when scholars began to grasp the etymology of the Latin ‘alchimista’, the chemist or practitioner; but it is far more likely to have followed Paracelsus’ decision to refer to medical chemistry as ‘chymia’ or ‘iatrochemia’. The word ‘chymia’ was also used extensively by the humanist physician, Georg Agricola (1494–1555), whose study of the German mining industry, De re metallica, was published in 1556. Although he used Latin coinages such as ‘chymista’ and ‘chymicus’, it is clear from their context that he was still referring, however, to alchemy, alchemical techniques and alchemists, and that he was, in the tradition of humanism, attempting to purify the spelling of a classical root that had been barbarized by Arabic contamination.

Agricola’s simplifications were widely adopted, notably in the Latin dictionary compiled by the Swiss naturalist, Konrad Gesner (1516–65) in 1551, as well as in his De remediis secretis: liber physicus, medicus et partim etiam chymicus (Zurich, 1552). As Rocke has shown, the latter work on pharmaceutical chemistry was widely translated into English, French and Italian, and seems to have been the fountain for the words that became the basis of modern European vocabulary: chimique, chimico, chymiste, chimist, etc. Curiously, the German translation of Gesner continued to render ‘chymistae’ as ‘Alchemisten’. German texts only moved towards the form Chemie and Chemiker in the early 1600s.

By then, influenced by the practical textbook tradition instituted by Libavius, as well as by the iatrochemistry of Paracelsus (chapter 2), ‘alchymia’ or ‘alchemy’ were increasingly terms confined to esoteric religious practices, while ‘chymia’ or ‘chemistry’ were used to label the long tradition of pharmaceutical and technological empiricism.