the name of the Church of Our Lady of the Isle, owing to its
insulation by a moat meeting the river Arrow. The monastery
was suppressed among the smaller houses in 1536. Traces of
the moat and the foundations are still to be seen in Priory
Close. The ancient fairs survived to the end of the 19th century.
in 1830 the needle-manufacture employed nearly a thousand hands.
ALCESTIS (ALKESTIS), in Greek legend the daughter of
Pelias and Anaxibia, and wife of Admetus, king of Pherae in
Thessaly. She consented to die in place of her husband,
and was afterwards rescued by Heracles. This beautiful
story of conjugal devotion forms the subject of the
Alcestis of Euripides, which furnished the basis of
Robert Browning's Balaustion's Adventure. Sophocles
also wrote an Alcestis, of which only fragments remain.
See Dissel, Der Mythos von Admetus und Alkestis, 1882.
ALCHEMY. In the narrow sense of the word, alchemy is the
pretended art of making gold and silver, or transmuting the
base metals into the noble ones. The idea of such transmutation
probably arose among the Alexandrian Greeks in the early
centuries of the Christian era; thence it passed to the
Arabs, by whom it was transmitted to western Europe, and its
realization was a leading aim of chemical workers down to the
time of Paracelsus and even later. But ``alchemy'' was something
more than a particularly vain and deluded manifestation of
the thirst for gold, as it is sometimes represented; in its
wider and truer significance it stands for the chemistry of
the middle ages. The idea of transmutation, in the country
of its origin, had a philosophical basis, and was linked
up with the Greek theories of matter there current; thus,
by supplying a central philosophical principle, it to some
extent unified and focussed chemical effort, which previously,
so far as it existed at all, had been expended on acquiring
empirical acquaintance with a mass of disconnected technical
processes. Alchemy in this sense is merely an early phase of
the development of systematic chemistry; in Liebig's words, it
was ``never at any time anything different from chemistry.''
Regarding the derivation of the word, there are two main views
which agree in holding that it has an Arabic descent, the
prefix al being the Arabic article. But according to one,
the second part of the word comes from the Greek chumeia,
pouring, infusion, used in connexion with the study of the
juices of plants, and thence extended to chemical manipulations
in general; this derivation accounts for the old-fashioned
spellings ``chymist'' and ``chymistry.'' The other view
traces it to khem or khame, hieroglyph khmi, which
denotes black earth as opposed to barren sand, and occurs in
Plutarch as chumeia; on this derivation alchemy is explained
as meaning the ``Egyptian art.'' The first occurrence of
the word is said to be in a treatise of Julius Firmicus, an
astrological writer of the 4th century, but the prefix al
there must be the addition of a later copyist. Among the
Alexandrian writers alchemy was designated as e tes chrusou
te kai argurou poieseos techne theia kai iera or
e episteme iera. In English, Piers Plowman (1362)
contains the phrase ``experimentis of alconomye,'' with
variants ``alkenemye'' and ``alknamye.'' The prefix al
begins to be dropped about the middle of the 16th century.
Origins of Alchemy.--Numerous legends cluster round the
origin of alchemy. According to one story, it was founded
by the Egyptian god Hermes (Thoth), the reputed inventor of
the arts and sciences, to whom, under the appellation Hermes
Trismegistus, Tertullian refers as the master of those who
occupy themselves with nature; after him later alchemists
called their work the ``hermetic art,'' and the seal of
Hermes, which they placed upon their vessels, is the origin
of the common phrase ``hermetically sealed.'' Another legend,
given by Zosimus of Panopolis, an alchemistical writer said
to date from the 3rd century, asserts that the fallen angels
taught the arts to the women they married (cf. Genesis vi.
2), their instruction being recorded in a book called
Chema. A similar story appears in the Book of Enoch,
and Tertullian has much to say about the wicked angels who
revealed to men the knowledge of gold and silver, of lustrous
stones, and of the power of herbs, and who introduced the
arts of astrology and magic upon the earth. Again, the
Arabic Kitab-al-Fihrist, written by al-Nadim towards the
end of the 10th century, says that the ``people who practise
alchemy, that is, who fabricate gold and silver from strange
metals, state that the first to speak of the science of the
work was Hermes the Wise, who was originally of Babylon, but
who established himself in Egypt after the dispersion of the
peoples from Babel.'' Another legend, also to be found in Arabic
sources, asserts that alchemy was revealed by God to Moses and
Aaron. But there is some evidence that, in accordance with
the strong and constant tradition among the alchemists, the
idea of transmutation did originate in Egypt with the Greeks of
Alexandria. In the Leiden museum there are a number of papyri
which were found in a tomb at Thebes, written probably in the
3rd century A.D., though their matter is older. Some are
in Greek and demotic, and one, of peculiar interest from the
chemical point of view, gives a number of receipts, in Greek,
for the manipulation of base metals to form alloys which simulate
gold and are intended to be used in the manufacture of imitation
jewellery. Possibly this is one of the books about gold
and silver of which Diocletian decreed the destruction about
A.D. 290--an act which Gibbon styles the first authentic
event in the history of alchemy (Decline and Fall, chap.
xiii.). The author of these receipts is not under any
delusion that he is transmuting metals; the MS. is merely
a workshop manual in which are described processes in daily
use for preparing metals for false jewellery, but it argues
considerable knowledge of methods of making alloys and colouring
metals. It has been suggested by M. P. E. Berthelot that
the workers in these processes, which were a monopoly of the
priestly caste and were kept strictly secret, though fully
aware that their products were not truly gold, were in time
led by their success in deceiving the public to deceive
themselves also, and to come to believe that they actually
had the power of making gold from substances which were not
gold. Philosophical sanction and explanation of this belief
was then found by bringing it into relation with the theory
of the prima materia, which was identical in all bodies
but received its actual form by the adjunction of qualities
expressed by the Aristotelian elements--earth, air, fire and
water. Some support for this view is gained from study
of the alchemistical writings of the period. Thus, in the
treatise known as Physica et Mystica and falsely ascribed
to Democritus (such false attributions are a constant feature
of the literature of alchemy), various receipts are given
for colouring and gilding metals, but the conception of
transmutation does not occur. This treatise was probably
composed at a date not very different from that of the Leiden
papyrus. Later, however, as in the Commentary on this
work written by Synesius to Dioscorus, priest of Serapis at
Alexandria, which probably dates from the end of the 4th
century, a changed attitude becomes apparent; the more
practical parts of the receipts are obscured or omitted,
and the processes for preparing alloys and colouring
metals, described in the older treatise, are by a mystical
interpretation represented as resulting in real transmutation.
But while there are thus some grounds for supposing that the
idea of transmutation grew out of the practical receipts of
Alexandrian Egypt, the alchemy which embraced it as a leading
principle was also strongly affected by Eastern influences
such as magic and astrology. The earliest Greek alchemistical
writings abound with references to Oriental authorities and
traditions. Thus the pseudo-Democritus, who was reputed the
author of the Physica et Mystica, which itself concludes
each of its receipts with a magical formula, was believed
to have travelled in Chaldaea, and to have had as his master
Ostanes1 the Mede, a name mentioned several times in the
Leiden papyrus, and often by early Christian writers such as
Tertullian, St Cyprian and St Augustine. The practices of
the Persian adepts also are appealed to in the writings of the
pseudo-Democritus, Zosimus and Synesius. The philosopher's
egg, as a symbol of creation, is both Egyptian and
Babylonian. In the Greek alchemists it appears as the symbol
at once of the art and of the universe, enclosing within
itself the four elements; and there is sometimes a play of
words between to on and to won. The conception of
man, the microcosm, containing in himself all the parts
of the universe or macrocosm, is also Babylonian, as again
probably is the famous identification of the metals with the
planets. Even in the Leiden papyrus the astronomical symbols
for the sun and moon are used to denote gold and silver, and
in the Meteorologica of Olympiodorus lead is attributed to
Saturn, iron to Mars, copper to Venus, tin to Hermes (Mercury)
and electrum to Jupiter. Similar systems of symbols, but
elaborated to include compounds, appear in Greek MSS. of
the 10th century, preserved in the library of St Mark's at
Venice. Subsequently electrum (an alloy of gold and silver)
disappeared as a specific metal, and tin was ascribed to Jupiter
instead, the sign of mercury becoming common to the metal and the
planet. Thus we read in Chaucer (Chanouns Yemannes Tale):--
The bodies sevene eek, lo! hem heer anoon:
Sol gold is, and Luna silver we threpe,
Mars yren, Mercurie quik-silver we clepe,
Saturnus leed and Jupiter is tin,
And Venus coper, by my fader kin!
Literature of Alchemy.--A considerable body of Greek chemical
writings is contained in MSS. belonging to the various great
libraries of Europe, the oldest being that at St Mark's, just
mentioned. The contents of these MSS. are all of similar
composition, and in Berthelot's opinion represent a collection
of treatises made at Constantinople in the 8th or 9th
century. The treatises are nearly all anterior to the 7th
century, and most appear to belong to the 3rd and 4th centuries;
some are the work of authentic authors like Zosimus and
Synesius, while of others, such as profess to be written by
Moses, Democritus, Ostanes, &c., the authorship is clearly
fictitious. Some of the same names and the same works can
be identified in the lists of the Kitab-al- Fihrist. But
the Arabs did not acquire their knowledge of this literature
at first hand. The earliest Hellenic culture in the East was
Syrian, and the Arabs made their first acquaintance with
Greek chemistry, as with Greek philosophy, mathematics,
medicine, &c., by the intermediary of Syriac translations.
(See ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY and SYRIAC LITERATURE.) Examples
of such translations are preserved in MSS. at the British
Museum, partly written in Syriac, partly in Arabic with Syriac
characters. In Berthelot's opinion, the Syriac portions
represent a compilation of receipts and processes undertaken in
the Syrian school of medicine at Bagdad under the Abbasids in
the 9th or 10th century, and to a large extent constituted by
the earlier translations made by Sergius of Resaena in the 6th
century. They contain, under the title Doctrine of Democritus,
a fairly methodical treatise in ten books comprising the
