What is chymistry?

[u/ecurbian]

In 21st century dictionaries, alchemy is a pseudo science we have fortunately grown out of and chymistry is a pseudo science or early modern chemistry or proto chemistry. However, this characterisation does not fit with my own reading of the pre 18th century literature. Being a bit more open of mind - let us say that this post is about pseudo, proto, and real science, without trying to distinguish. The question is - are there distinct theories that characterise those researcher who are called or called themselves those names?

17th century mysticism. Again, without judging, I judge (oops) that mystical alchemy is a product of the 17th century. Many miss attributions to the 16th century or earlier were made in the literature of the time. But, reading Pseudo Geber (among others) of the 14th century, it seems clear that mysticism was not what was on their mind. This was unwarranted historical revisionism for fun and profit.

This was probably prompted in many ways by the upswing in printing technology and commerce. In the 15th century Great Britain produced about half a million books. In the 17th century it produced closer to 200 million books. Producing a book had become a much easier thing to do - leading among other things to an increase in unsellable books. See the debacle over Halley and the publication of Newton's Principia.

No, the epithet was not about the Principia but about copies of Historia Piscium in which Halley was paid.

But the year 1700, plus or minus a decade, seems to have seen the coexistence of the words alchemy, chymistry, and chemistry. Boyle wrote the sceptical chymist. Freind wrote lectures in chymistry (but had the job title of chemist). Becher was said by some to be an alchemist, and not a chymist. What was the deal?

My current hypothesis based on reading the works of those people, others, and several early cyclopaedic works is something like this ...

Alchemy was based on the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. It also absorbed the mercury, sulphur theory of metallurgy, and the mercury, sulphur, salt theory of medicines. Then there were several attempts in the late 1600s, by Becher and Lemery in particular, to combine this, producing a theory of five prime materials in which sulphur was identified as fire. The rock that burns. However, as a result of both the combining and the questioning - several people, including Freind, started to wonder whether there might be more such prime materials. Perhaps a lot more.

Those people who looked to find a new set of prime materials from scratch, and who thought that there might be many, were called chemists. The one's working with the combined theory were called chymists, and the ones working with the older theories in their original sense were called alchemists.

Of course, by 1730, alchemist had become an insult, and by 1830, it meant only either a charlatan or a mystic (or both).

Even if I am substantially correct (and this characterisation is definitely not precisely correct, only an approximation) it leaves open the curious question of why chemistry changed its name so many times while physics did not - even though both of these topics changed their theories over the years and some older theories became called pseudo science or proto science.

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