The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry

CHAPTER XI. THE EXAMINATION OF THE PHENOMENA OF COMBUSTION. The alchemists thought that the most effectual method of separating a complex substance into more simple substances was to subject it to the action of heat. They were constantly distilling, incinerating, subliming, heating, in order that the spirit, or inner kernel of things, might be obtained. They took for granted that the action of fire was to simplify, and that simplification proceeded whatever might be the nature of the substance which was subjected to this action. Boyle insisted that the effect of heating one substance may be, and often is, essentially different from the effect of heating another substance; and that the behaviour of the same substance when heated, sometimes varies when the conditions are changed. He takes the example of heating sulphur or brimstone: "Exposed to a moderate fire in subliming pots, it rises all into dry, and almost tasteless, flowers; whereas being exposed to a naked fire, it affords store of a saline and fretting liquor." Boyle thought that the action of fire was not necessarily to separate a thing into its principles or elements, but, in most cases, was either to rearrange the parts of the thing, so that new, and it might be, more complex things, were produced, or to form less simple things by the union of the substance with what he called, "the matter of fire."