A History of Chemistry

These contained the story from the Renaissance to the present day-an account fuller in detail, documentation, new views and finds than anything that had gone before. They were published during the author's lifetime and enjoyed the meticulous care which he was wont to apply to proofreading and correcting of errata. Five years have elapsed since his death in October 1965 and we are happy and grateful to have in the book under notice a further though much less weighty and only introductory part to Volume I which should cover the highly complicated and in parts uncharted chemistry of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, East and West. With its more than 3000 references and detailed and critical chapters treating of Greek Philosophy from ancient Orphic cosmology to Gnosticism, magic papyri, astrology, Mithraism, Mandaeism, Zoroastrianism, the Harranians (Sabians) and Kabbala we are offered a reference work and study-matter of the first order and of acute interest for scholars in many fields outside chemistry and notably for the medical historian. Perhaps its most distinguished feature is the registration and development of scientific detail against the background of the ancient philosophies and beliefs. In this the presentation of Aristotle and his chemical and physical knowledge and ideas is outstanding, and Medicine from Hippocrates to the Byzantine era has received careful attention. The work is fittingly introduced by the obituary notice from The Times, 11 October 1965, followed by Partington's presidential address to the British Society of the History of Science in 1951 on: 'Chemistry as Rationalised Alchemy'. It is in the latter that we find highly important and salutary lessons for the historian of science and the human intellect as a whole. Here is chemistry, the prototype of a genuine science, as Kant called it, and yet its development followed lines quite different from those which led other branches, notably the physical sciences, to their modem glories. For if it has been said that 'science is measurement' it must be borne in mind that 'Chemistry is a science and not at all measurement'. Indeed, Partington shows that chemistry had no field in which to look for possible progress other than alchemy, for it had been the alchemists alone who had been productive of basic facts rather than abstract postulates and laws derived from quite different fields in which no progress and scientific build-up could have been expected. Alchemy today is often dismissed as something …