Product Description: The purpose of this book is to give a short and clear account of the alchemists, their ways of thought and their contribution to man's achievement. This is a peculiarly difficult task firstly because we do not know all that the alchemists believed and did owing to their deliberate and avowed concealment of the parts of their work that they considered most important; secondly because the alchemical habit of thought was very unlike that of the modern reader; and lastly because so much of their work remains unstudied and a great deal of what is known about them is still a battle ground for conversationalists...read more