Union Académique Internationale Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs

Abstract

NO one who has not himself rummaged among the old chemical manuscripts in the great libraries can have any idea of the vast quantity of material which awaits investigation. Even the printed literature of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries has been by no means fully studied, but of the earlier manuscript material only a fraction has hitherto been examined. This neglect is reflected in our histories of chemistry, which commonly begin seriously with Priestley and Lavoisier, by whose time chemistry was already well established on lines not widely different from those of to-day. The earlier periods are usually dealt with very summarily, since to give an adequate account of them, in the present state of our knowledge, would entail years of laborious work upon the original sources. The very ideas themselves, from their un familiar nature, often seem entirely unintelligible.

Union Académique Internationale. Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs.

1: Les Parisini. Décrits par Henri Lebègue. En Appendice, Les manuscrits des Coeranides et tables générales, par Marie Delcourt. Pp. x + 320. n.p. 3: Les manuscrits des Îles Britanniques. Décrits par Dorothea Waley Singer, avec la collaboration d'Annie Anderson et William J. Anderson. En appendice, Les recettes alchimiques de Codex Holkhamicus, éditées par Otto Lagercrantz. Pp. vii + 84. n.p. (Bruxelles: Maurice Lamertin, 1924.)